Increasingly SMEs in Uganda are experimenting with social media as a way of promoting their business. It is common to find businesses with links to facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Pineterest, You tube, Yelp, Four Square, Level Up, Reddit, Stumble Upon or Digg etc as a mode of marketing, networking and distributing products.

It is also utilised for giving business a more interpersonal dimension that must ride on personal and social networks and trust. Social media is also used for consumer feedback and gaining additional insights from customers. It is useful for monitoring consumer and market trends, evaluating products, mapping consumer decision making processes, identifying new product platforms, developing and refining new products and optimising go to market strategies. It is used to pre-test marketing and promotional messages.

This paper however focuses particularly on how women have used social media for their businesses with a backdrop that ICTs have been and continue to be promoted as a potential tool for women’s empowerment.

A critical analysis is given to the emerging evidence that mostly younger women in Uganda ( in their twenties) use social media for business, however the older group mostly continue to do business the same old way with the exception of mobile telephony which is used for a range of purposes in business including placing orders, paying for products, paying bills, transferring money and for market price updates.