Social Media as a Support for Sustainable Development of SMEs: Positioning, Image and Commitment

In the context of digitalization, social media have become key tools for strengthening business competitiveness and sustainability. The objective of this work was to analyze the effect of social media use on the sustainable development of ecuadorian hotel MSMEs, considering the explanatory variables of digital positioning, brand image, and customer engagement. A quantitative approach was adopted, applying a survey to managers of 93 two- and three-star hotels. Based on the collected data, a multilayer perceptron (MLP) artificial neural network model was developed to capture nonlinear relationships among variables and to assess its predictive capacity regarding business sustainability, operationalized through ordinal categories. The model results show sat-isfactory predictive performance, with an overall accuracy of 90.1% in the training set and 84% in the test set. The normalized importance analysis revealed that variables as-sociated with customer engagement- particularly responsiveness via social media to tourists’ interests- exert the greatest influence on the sustainability of MSMEs, surpas-sing brand image and digital positioning. These findings confirm that active interaction and timely responses on social media are decisive factors in enhancing the sustainable development of these enterprises.