Valuing Social Media Affordances

Abstract

Various social media products concentrate differently on social media affordances to meet the needs of users. When designing social media products, understanding the value of each social media affordance is crucial to realizing commercial success. This study aims to expand the limited understanding of social media affordances from the perspective of users’ monetary valuations. An in situ investigation was conducted among 39 users to estimate the value of eight social media affordances. We tracked participants’ daily social media usage and assessed how they valued each affordance every day for two weeks. We contrasted the difference between willingness to accept (WtA) and willingness to pay (WtP) when making monetary valuations. Furthermore, we examined how perceived social capital and social media addiction influenced users’ valuations of each affordance. The results showed that affordances like Conversation and Instrument were most valued. Affordances like Identity, Presence, and Reputation were least valued, but they were associated with addiction. These findings can be used as guidelines on what affordances should be concentrated on when designing the commercial strategies of social media products. They also identified which affordances should be controlled to prevent users from suffering social media addiction.