Investigating the Effect of Social Media Platform Affordances on User Engagement

Objective
With the high influence of social media on the lives of people in the community, the competition between different social media to engage more and more users on their platforms has increased. Social media platforms have become the ubiquity media in the everyday lives of people, especially due to penetration of smartphones. While they provide information, Communication, entertainment and value creation opportunities for their users, there is an intensified competition among them to attract new users and increase their network power. In such competition, engagement is the key term that implies on the level of interaction between the user and platform. Although the concept of social media engagement has been prominent in the literature and research in recent decades, affordances have rarely been studied as influential elements in engagement. Affordances are capabilities that the platform provides to users for activity and exchange of value and user experience, and therefore engage users. Despite the importance of social media affordances in user engagement and the success of social media, there are still poor body of literature. In this regard, the present article analyzes the existing literature to develop a framework for better understanding the relationships between influential variables, including contextual differences in affordance and user engagement on social media. Engagement defined as the quality of the user experience for social media activit`y, which can be uniquely experienced by each user (Voorveld et al., 2018) and measured through actions such as commenting, liking, and content sharing. The context of each social media refers to the unique architecture, culture, and norms of each (Van Dijck, 2013), which are categorized in different ways. Kaplan and Haenlein (2010) argue that social presence/media richness and self-presentation/self-disclosure are the defining characteristics of social media. Using these characteristics, they distinguish collaborative projects, blogs, content communities, social networking sites, virtual game worlds, and virtual social worlds.
Zhu and Chen (2015) developed a typology based on two characteristics of social media: nature of connection (profile based versus content-based) and level of customization of messages (the degree to which a service is customized to satisfy an individual’s particular preferences). Different classifications of social media are the result of their different contexts, and one of the criteria for different contexts between platforms is the affordances they provide or prevent. For example, Instagram restricts the affordance of public posting or posting an image in a comment, while Facebook does not. The affordance of retweeting on Twitter by a celebrity is an act of personal and public recognition and creates a sense of intimacy for fans. The affordance of retweeting creates a form of conversation because users retweet to be part of a conversation and convey their opinion about that tweet to their followers (Tanupabrungsun et al., 2018).
Affordance Theory takes a socio-technical perspective that lets us be specific about the technology while simultaneously incorporating social and contextual elements. (Volkoff, & Strong, 2017). The value of affordance theory appears when it is used as a lens to change the view of social media engagement and contextual differences. Despite the wide range of research on social media and user engagement, none of the research studies addresses how affordances make possible social engagement processes (Zeng et al., 2018). Therefore, by adopting the affordance theory in engaging users and reviewing the previous studies, we seek the answer to the question of how the experience of affordances in social media affects user engagement?
Research Methodology
The method used in this research is the Bibliometric Analysis. The literature review of the present study is divided into three areas: 1. Engagement; 2. Affordance; 3. Affordance + Engagement in social media. The most reputable scientific databases, including Routledge, Elsevier, Sage, Wiley, and Emerald, were selected to find research papers on social media engagement and social media affordance. The research documents in the Google Scholar database were also searched and reviewed. In the field of engagement, with the aim of the overview of the subject, a manual search was performed without a time limit until reaching theoretical saturation, articles with high citations in marketing and media were selected and their information was extracted. Pursuing the same goal, in the field of affordance, since the basic concepts and comprehensive definitions were considered, the articles were searched with high citations and without a time limit. Finally, 15 articles were selected and their information was reported in a table (see Table 1). In the third part of the study, which was related to the main purpose of the article and the research issue, a systematic review of scientific articles from 2010 to 2021 was performed in the Web of Science database. In total, 76 articles were found. Limiting the scope of the search to Communication, Management, Business, Computer Science, and I­­nformation Science, 34 articles remained. The abstracts of these articles were examined in depth. Finally, 7 articles were selected and their information was reported in another table.
Findings
A review of the literature over the past decade using Bibliometric Analysis provides a knowledge base for future research. It Identifies and categorizes studies on the effect of affordances on user engagement on social media. Study of the effect of affordances on user engagement from a theoretical perspective to develop the literature and find the knowledge gap from an executive perspective and investing in platforms to create new opportunities for a richer social networking experience is needed and valuable. Such an effort contributes to the presentation of scientific works and theoretical and practical participation in the field under study. Given the fact that this field of study is relatively new and that little work has been done in this area, the current study can contribute to categorizing and integrating the prior knowledge in a meaningful way to provide a coherent framework.
Falahatpisheh, & Khajeheian (2020) presented a new and comprehensive typology of affordances, they classify the affordances into 13 groups: Cognitive, physical, sensory, functional, explicit, graphic, language, hidden, pattern, metaphorical, false, negative, and animated affordances are the major types that are identified in their research. Trim and Leonardi (2013), by reviewing past research on the use of social media in organizations offer four relatively fixed affordances, including visibility, editability, persistence, and association. Based on the possibilities discovered by Trim and Leonardi, Zeng et al. develop a theoretical model and examine it in industry. They argue that the functional capabilities of social media are socialized through processes of engagement. Their findings confirm that visibility, persistence, and editability in the industry contribute to shaping the engagement processes, which include recognizing and understanding customer’s needs and motivations, enhancing participation, and motivating collaboration. Studying the impact of these affordances and the limitations or empowerments that result from them on user engagement can provide a basis for increasing knowledge about user engagement on these platforms. There were few studies about the relationship between social media affordances and engagement.