How Social Media Can Afford Engagement Processes

Abstract

The increasing popularity of social media has led many organizations to find new ways of customer engagement. This paper presents an initial pilot study to explore the affordance of social media in engagement processes. By applying the affordance theory and Porter's process for engagement model, we used a case study approach to examine the case company's Facebook and Twitter content to identify the engagement possibilities of social media. Our preliminary results show that social media opens a new channel for organisations to engage with their customers. We present a preliminary theoretical model to understand the how the functional affordances of social media are socialised in engagement processes, which ultimately gives rise to socialised affordances.

Engaging Customers on Facebook Coffee Shops' Brand-Fan Pages

“…At the same time, companies try to find new ways of connecting and engaging us to their activities (Zeng et al, 2019) and therefore use the active management of social media presence (Miller et al, 2013) to establish and maintain a competitive advantage (Chan et al, 2014).…”