With the rise of diversification of individuals’ social media use, the need for understanding the differences across various social media platforms has become more salient. However, based on the findings of a 10-year-long literature review of social media advertising, prior scholars rarely focused on the medium differences in social media, as compared to other factors, such as message variance, individual differences, and source influence. To fill such a research gap, the fundamental purpose of this research project, thus, is to introduce the new concept titled enacted affordances of social media and its typologies to understand the differences across various social media platforms. Additionally, the current research project also holds the purpose to showcase how the newly developed concept can be applied in empirical communication studies. Therefore, taking social media advertising context as an example, this project investigated the relationship between the enacted affordances of social media and individuals’ responses to social media advertising. Specifically, the study compared the six types of enacted affordances of social media regarding their influential impact on advertising acceptance and avoidance. Results indicated that, in general, the enacted affordance of non-relational content had a stronger impact than the enacted affordance of relational content in driving consumers’ acceptance of social media advertising. The enacted affordance of content creation of a social media platform had more impact than the enacted affordance of content consumption in increasing consumers’ acceptance of social media advertising. Moreover, the current study also suggests that consumers’ advertising avoidance and advertising acceptance are not two sides of one coin due to the fact that the enacted affordances of social media were not found having the same significant relationships with advertising avoidance as advertising acceptance. The research project ends with discussion its theoretical contribution, managerial implications, as well as the limitations and future research directions.
Read
