Evaluating the Business Impacts of Social Media Use with System Dynamics and Agent-Based Modeling: A Literature Review

Social media has been widely adopted as a useful business tool, especially in the domain of business to consumer marketing. However, the deployment of social media tools to business processes is hindered by the lack of concrete indicators of the effects its use has on the business process. Computer based modeling has been widely used to simulate and predict business effects in other streams of study, but relatively little in the evaluation of social media impacts. This paper argues that System Dynamics and Agent-Based Modeling have been and should be utilized in measuring social media and its impacts in business context in general, as well as in the context of business ecosystems. The authors review the current state of the use of these simulation methods in the evaluation of social media business impacts by conducting a systematic literature review.