2022
By Sarah Marschlich
Previous research conceived social media affordances as opportunities for action enabled by platforms technologies or as the result of users’ agency, neglecting that users act building on their perception of platform properties, gratifications, and other individual factors. To overcome the shortcomings, this research conceives affordances as the interplay between the social media platforms and the individual user, analyzing affordances in the context of organizations’ communication on social media. Combining survey, data donation, and in-depth interviews in which individuals are exposed to their actual social media usage, this project sheds light on the emergence of social media affordances and their consequences for user engagement, considering technological features and individual factors. The methodology allows for a much more valid and accurate measurement of social media affordances and significantly contributes to collecting digital communication data through donated log-based data and self-report measures.