ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the conceptual foundations of social media and then provides an overview of consumer behavior pertaining to social media. It explores how social media informs studies of the self, social influence, and consumer communities. Social media has some traits associated with interpersonal communication, yet it also shares other traits with mass communication. Social media usually, although not necessarily, involves the use of digital technology to facilitate the kind of public or semi-public communication. Affordances are aspects of a particular social media platform that enable some behaviors and constrain others. To systematically study affordances, researchers have outlined six attributes of social media: social presence, temporal structure, media richness, permanence, replicability, and mobility. Publics are different from communities in that they are based on a shared focus rather than interpersonal connections, are structured by affect rather than discussion and deliberation, and are driven by a logic of visibility and publicity rather than identity.
