Opportunities for Social Media to Support Aspiring Entrepreneurs with Financial Constraints
This blog post summarizes the article “Opportunities for Social Media to Support Aspiring Entrepreneurs with Financial Constraints,” by Aarti Israni, Julie Hui, and Tawanna Dillahunt.
How can we, as HCI researchers and practitioners, facilitate a sense of safety and support to encourage resource exchange in online spaces? Social media are increasingly becoming sources of information and emotional support for many people transitioning to entrepreneurship. The benefits, however, are more often realized by those who feel comfortable disclosing their identities and resource needs online. This can be difficult for individuals in marginalized communities, especially when online spaces may be perceived as unsafe or unwelcoming to their identities. In this paper, we discuss:
- Financially-constrained aspiring entrepreneurs’ experiences seeking support on social media in their transition to entrepreneurship
- Opportunities for designers and researchers to understand how a sense of safety and support can be facilitated online.
For many individuals in financially-constrained communities in the United States, entrepreneurship is perceived as an alternative path to financial stability, affording both the flexibility and ability to work without post-secondary career training. Still, for many financially-constrained individuals, many of whom are also racial minorities, becoming an entrepreneur is not easy. In addition to navigating limited access to financial capital for launching a business, research suggests that when compared to their white counterparts, minority entrepreneurs face many challenges to achieving their goals. Such hurdles include reduced access to social networks, financial capital, and digital support for their businesses. To compensate for these challenges, financially-constrained aspiring entrepreneurs must often expand their social networks to obtain this support, leveraging both offline community events and social media.
While social media is a resource for many aspiring entrepreneurs to obtain informational and emotional support for their transition to entrepreneurship, past research has suggested that in financially-constrained communities, perceived online norms, requisite communication skills, and privacy concerns may inhibit them from publicly disclosing their identities and resource needs online. Thus, to better understand how financially-constrained aspiring entrepreneurs leverage social media platforms and how they navigate these challenges , we analyzed a sub-sample of interviews from two empirical studies conducted in the Metropolitan Detroit area with resource-constrained entrepreneurs. We drew from work-role transition scholarship to examine these experiences, looking at how participants leveraged social media during different phases of their transition to entrepreneurship (e.g., exploration, provisional trial, evaluation).
We found that participants used social media primarily to identify the next steps needed to become entrepreneurs, including requisite skills and answers to logistical questions (e.g., how to set up taxes) once they had an idea about the kind of entrepreneur they wanted to become (e.g., makeup artist, creator and seller of food products). However, participants reported feeling less comfortable publicly disclosing their informational or emotional needs or seeking feedback on their ideas in online spaces that felt unsafe due to fears of discrimination, harassment, and uncertainty around community norms.
Instead, participants described seeking feedback offline from other trusted individuals in their network or on closed Facebook Groups that encouraged a more supportive environment. We report how online groups that limit membership to individuals of specific shared identities helped people feel more comfortable being vulnerable about their entrepreneurial needs and challenges.
While our findings highlight the importance of fostering a sense of safety and support in online communities, they also speak to the informational benefits that diverse identities may provide. While participants avoided publicly requesting information in certain online communities perceived as unsafe, they reported remaining members of these groups due to the perceived informational benefits. And while the majority of our participants did not use social media platforms to obtain feedback, they acknowledged the importance of seeking objective feedback from people outside family and friends.
There are opportunities for HCI researchers and practitioners to facilitate a sense of safety while also enabling informational support in online communities, considering the unique needs of individuals in financially constrained communities. To restore trust and mitigate identity threats in diverse online communities, HCI designers can offer suggestions to those in one’s audience about ways to respond to questions and other disclosures that restore trust and mitigate identity threats. For instance, if one encounters a post where an individual is seeking feedback, articles or resources could pop up to offer advice on responding to such requests. Alternatively, to facilitate interactions with potential mentors and peers with shared identities, designers could consider giving users the option of creating subgroups or small niche communities within a larger online community. Past HCI research indicates that small online communities may be more effective for individuals seeking expertise, perspectives, and knowledge as the goals of these groups are more narrow. Given the importance of offline interactions to build trusted interpersonal relationships in financially-constrained communities, there are opportunities for future research to examine how smaller online and offline niche groups may facilitate interpersonal interactions between financially-constrained aspiring entrepreneurs and impact their perceived safety.
