Social Media Research Notes

Defining Social Media and Asking Research Questions

  • Social media scholarship introduction.
  • Burgess et al. (2018): Social media paradigm is shaping media and communications.
  • Estimated 3.6 billion users in 2020, nearly half the world's population (Statista, 2021).
  • Social movements and political events highlight social media's role.
    • Black Lives Matter (Mundt et al., 2018).
    • #MeToo (Fileborn and Loney-Howes, 2019).
    • 2016 Brexit vote and US presidential elections (Gorodnichenko et al., 2018).
  • Social media research is growing but lacks a widely accepted definition.
  • Challenges due to lack of definition:
    • Difficult to generalize findings.
    • Unclear which tools/platforms are social media.
    • Definitions vary based on researcher background (van Mil and Henman, 2016).
  • Social media has evolved into a digital 'Swiss army knife'.
    • Integrates new features and addresses user needs.
    • Offers voice and video calls (Facebook).
    • Encourages in-app shopping (Instagram).
    • Facilitates payments (Facebook Pay, WeChat).
    • Supports content monetization (Snapchat Spotlight).
  • Key questions:
    • How to define social media?
    • How to categorize different types of social media?
  • Boundaries between social media and other media are blurring.
  • Recommendations for scholars:
    • Navigate the field with conceptual clarity.
    • Outline social media research questions.
    • Address challenges:
      • Use of social media as part of media repertoires.
      • Rapid change and diversification (Swiss army knife metaphor).
      • Blur between online and offline activities.
      • Importance of context.

What is Social Media?

  • Few formal definitions exist.
  • Lack of definitions is due to the evolving nature of social media.
  • Social media is conceptually related to Social Networking Sites (SNSs) and Online Social Networks (OSNs).
  • SNSs and OSNs launched around 2003-2004 (hi5, MySpace, Friendster).
  • SNS and OSN usage grew rapidly in computer science, communication, and sociology.
  • Scholar's Portal search:
    • SNS had more references than 'social media' between 2003-2008.
    • Usage of both terms increased exponentially.
  • Between 2009-2014, 'social media' was more frequent than 'SNS'.
  • From 2014-2021:
    • 'Social media' - 101,396 items.
    • SNS - 10,042 items.
    • OSN - 1,965 items.
  • Reasons for the shift:
    • Social media is broader, including blogging.
    • Social media is associated with newer platforms (TikTok, Instagram, Twitter).
    • SNS is associated with older platforms (Facebook, LinkedIn).
  • SNSs and OSNs are considered subtypes of social media.
  • Literature review shows consensus on the meaning of social media.
  • Database search: Communication and Mass Media Complete (2018-2020).
    • 3,440 results for 'social media'.
    • Random sample of 250 publications reviewed.
  • Findings:
    • Publications not focused on social media: 39(16%)39 (16\%).
    • Publications focused on social media: 211211.
    • No definition of social media: 183(73%)183 (73\%).
    • Definition provided: 34(14%)34 (14\%).
    • Definition of a specific platform: 6(2%)6 (2\%).
    • Definition of SNSs: 3(1%)3 (1\%).
  • Definitions agree social media is Internet-based and, in some cases, accessible via mobile devices.
  • Content is user-generated, but bot-generated content is increasing.
  • Automation of content production requires further exploration.
  • Social media allows interaction by enabling communication, collaboration, creation, modification, and content sharing.
  • Users participate in online conversations and exchange content.
  • Interactions are at the heart of social media.
  • Definition Proposed:
    • Social media are web-based and mobile services that allow individuals, communities, and organizations to collaborate, connect, interact, and build community by enabling them to create, co-create, modify, share, and engage with content (user- or bot-generated).

A Typology of Social Media

  • Attempts to categorize social media by function, reach, audience, or purpose.

  • Arora (2012): Metaphor-based typology:

    • Utilitarian-driven
    • Aesthetic-driven
    • Context-driven
    • Play-driven
    • Value-driven

  • Categorizations based on marketing capabilities or features are more common.

  • Burgess et al. (2018): Typology of ten types:

    1. Social networking sites or SNSs
    2. Photo and video sharing apps
    3. Music-sharing sites
    4. Video sites
    5. Blogs
    6. Texting apps
    7. Forums
    8. Location-based technologies
    9. Groupware
    10. Annotation and aggregation sites.

  • Rowlands et al. (2011): Categorization based on user base.

    • Collaborative software tools (authoring, conferencing, scheduling).

  • Hootsuite (2017): Typology based on shopping and consumer ratings.

  • Social media are increasingly accessible via smartphones and tablets.

  • Researchers should use broader terms like 'social media', 'social media services', or 'social media platforms'.

  • Gillespie (2018) definition of online platforms.

  • Online platforms host, organize, and circulate users’ shared content or social interactions for them without having produced or commissioned (the bulk of) that content, built on an infrastructure, beneath that circulation of information, for processing data for customer service, advertising, and profit. (p. 18)

  • Typology of Social Media (Table 2.1):

  1. Social Networking:
    • Examples: Facebook, LinkedIn, VKontakte, QZone
    • Definition: Web-based services for constructing profiles, listing connections, and viewing connections of others (boyd and Ellison, 2007: 211).
  2. Media Sharing:
    • Examples: Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, SoundCloud, QQ, Douyin, Kuaishou
    • Definition: Platforms for finding and sharing media online, including photos, video, and live video (Hootsuite, 2017).
  3. Messengers:
    • Examples: WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger
    • Definition: Enable users to send text and voice messages, make audio and video calls, create group chats, and share media (Gangneux, 2020: 2).
  4. Microblogging:
    • Examples: Twitter, Sina Weibo
    • Definition: Communication in short posts distributed by instant messages, mobile phones, email, or the Web (Java et al., 2009: 118).
  5. Forums:
    • Examples: Reddit, 4chan
    • Definition: Communication portals connecting people interested in similar topics, hosting online discussions with feedback and likes (Marett and Joshi, 2009: 48; Snow et al., 2017).
  6. Content Curation and Aggregation (Bookmarking):
    • Examples: CiteULike, Pinboard
    • Definition: Provide direct and indirect navigational advice based on collective public behavior, offering social filtering on web resources (Millen et al., 2007: 22).
  7. Geolocation-Based Technologies:
    • Examples: Foursquare, Tinder
    • Definition: Mobile technologies using spatial and temporal location to deliver content specific to a moment and place (Pieber and Quan-Haase, 2021: 2).
  8. Blogs:
    • Examples: WordPress, Tumblr
    • Definition: Websites displaying date-stamped entries in reverse chronological order, serving as personal web pages or summaries of information (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010: 63).
  9. Groupware / Collaborative Software:
    • Examples: Slack, Discord, Wikipedia, Zoom
    • Definition: Software designed to support coordinated activity across groups, allowing interaction through artefact manipulation or direct communication channels (Collazos et al., 2019).
  10. Consumer Review Platforms:
    • Examples: Yelp, TripAdvisor
    • Definition: Services allowing people to find, review, and share information about brands, products, services, restaurants, and travel destinations (Hootsuite, 2017).

  • Platforms can be expanded in a modular fashion.

  • Digital platform is an ‘extensible codebase of a software-based system that provides core functionality shared by the modules that interoperate with it and the interfaces through which they interoperate’ (Tiwana et al., 2010: 675).

  • Modules are add-on software systems that connect to the platform (Tiwana et al., 2010).

  • WeChat incorporates a wide range of third-party apps as a modular platform.

  • Exploratory review of publications (250) investigated social media types and specific sites/apps.

    • 164 publications mentioned at least one social media platform.
    • Remaining articles discuss social media as a tool in general terms.

  • Frequency of Social Media Types (Table 2.2):

  1. Social Networking:
    • Mentions: 118
    • Facebook: 117
    • LinkedIn: 14
    • Google+: 5
    • RenRen: 2
  2. Media Sharing:
    • Mentions: 66
    • Instagram: 45
    • YouTube: 26
    • SnapChat: 16
    • Flickr: 3
    • Vine: 2
  3. Messengers:
    • Mentions: 15
    • WhatsApp: 10
    • Other / General: 5
  4. Microblogging:
    • Mentions: 110
    • Twitter: 106
    • Sina Weibo: 4
  5. Forums:
    • Mentions: 10
    • Reddit: 6
    • Other / General: 4
  6. Content Curation and Aggregation (Bookmarking):
    • Mentions: 6
    • Pinterest: 6
  7. Geolocation-Based Technologies:
    • Mentions: 2
    • YikYak: 1
    • Foursquare: 1
  8. Blogs:
    • Mentions: 16
    • Tumblr: 6
    • Other / General: 10
  9. Groupware / Collaborative Software:
    • Mentions: 0
  10. Consumer Review Platforms:
    • Mentions: 1
    • Yelp: 1

  • Total articles mentioning specific platforms: 164

  • Facebook and Twitter are the most discussed platforms.

  • Reasons for preference:

    • Facebook is widely adopted in North America.
      • 96%96\% of Americans reported using Facebook in 2019.
      • 37%37\% used Instagram, 28%28\% used Pinterest, and 22%22\% used Twitter (Pew Research Center, 2019).
    • Twitter transforms information and news diffusion.
      • 59%59\% of Americans used Twitter for news, followed by Facebook (54%54\%) and Reddit (42%42\%) (Pew Research Center, 2021).
    • Twitter is referenced in mainstream media.
    • Easy and low-cost mining of Twitter content through its API (Hollingshead et al., 2022).

  • Media sharing platforms are often the focus of research, especially Instagram.

  • Blogs, messengers, forums, content curation, geolocation tech, and consumer review platforms are less discussed.

  • Collaborative software (Discord, Wikipedia) is not often studied under the label 'social media'.

  • Reasons for absence:

    • Groupware is used in a professional context.
    • Content focuses on business operations.
    • Technologies serve to complete tasks, not support social connections.

  • Bruns (2015): 'all media are social, but only a particular subset of all media are fundamentally defined by their sociality’ (p. 1).

  • Social elements are embedded in many technologies.

  • Proportion covering non-US-based platforms was minimal due to search delimitation in English.

  • Popular Chinese social media: WeChat, QQ, and Douyin (TikTok).

    • WeChat has 1.2 billion users.
    • QQ has 648 million users.
    • Douyin has 1 billion users (Statista, 2020).

  • WeChat is a 'multipurpose application' (Montag et al., 2018) and resembles a Swiss army knife (Vis, 2019).

  • Offers messaging, video chat, posting images/videos/links ('moments' feature).

  • Provides an ecosystem for online shopping, paying bills, and booking rideshares.

  • Social commerce on Instagram and Facebook allows users to purchase goods without leaving the site/app (Keyes, 2020).

  • Social media expanding into more domains of everyday life opens new avenues for future research, but also makes the definition of social media fuzzy.

What Questions Can Social Media Research Answer?

  • Presents a roadmap to research questions social media can inform.
  • Early research drew from various approaches and was less grounded in any one discipline.
  • Scholars now use social media data to answer issue-specific questions linked to their disciplines.
  • Importance of this development:
    • Frames research questions within theoretical approaches and discourses.
    • Allows for social media methods that fit with the epistemologies of a discipline.
    • Allows research to inform disciplinary-specific and overarching research problems.
    • Suggests social media research is becoming mainstream.
  • Roadmap outlines three core areas of investigation:
    1. Social media use and impacts.
    2. Methodological and ethical questions.
    3. Critical studies.
Core Area 1: Questions Relating to Social Media Use and Impacts
  • Builds on McCay-Peet and Quan-Haase's (2016) framework.
  • Identified six elements of social media use and impacts:
    1. Presentation of self, reputation management, and privacy.
    2. Action and participation.
    3. Uses and gratifications.
    4. Positive and negative experiences.
    5. Usage and activity counts.
    6. Social context.
  • Augmented model with two additional elements:
    1. Platform characteristics and affordances.
    2. Platform regulatory frameworks.
  • Platform characteristics are critical for understanding content creation, sharing, interaction, and mobilization.
  • Example: Twitter supports one-way flows of information, while Facebook supports reciprocal linkages.
  • Understanding platform characteristics relates to social phenomena & provides insight into these platforms’ affordances for social behaviour.
  • Brief description of the elements:
    1. Presentation of self, reputation management, and privacy:
      • Identity is crafted through personal profiles. Research question: 'are university student Facebook users more concerned about social privacy or institutional privacy?’ (Young and Quan-Haase, 2013: 483).
    2. Action and participation:
      • Social media enables various activities. Research question: ‘what kinds of activities do scholars engage with on the Twitter network?’ (Veletsianos, 2012: 339).
    3. Uses and gratifications:
      • Users have different motivations for adoption and use. Research question: ‘what are online user motives for using social recommendation systems?’ (Kim, 2014: 186).
    4. Positive and negative experiences:
      • Aspects that compel people to use social media, such as positive emotions, serendipity, and flow. Research question: ‘what are the factors affecting users to be deeply involved in social media?’ (Chan and Ma, 2014: 17).
    5. Usage and activity counts:
      • Data associated with users’ actions and participation Research question: ‘how does the ratio of followers to follows impact perceived credibility?’ (Westerman et al., 2012: 201).
    6. Social context:
      • Social, political, economic, work, and personal phenomena Research question: ‘does (national) culture determine how we schedule events online?’ (Reinecke et al., 2013: 45). Another question: ‘are Twitter users a representative sample of society?’ (Mislove et al., 2011: 554).
    7. Platform features and affordances:
      • Factors relating to specific platforms’ features. Research question: ‘are the motivations that predict general Facebook use different from the motivations that predict use of specific Facebook features?’ (Smock et al., 2011: 2324).
    8. Platform regulatory framework:
      • Increasing need for regulatory frameworks. Platforms ‘seek protection for facilitating user expression, yet also seek limited liability for what those users say’ (Gillespie, 2010: 347).
  • Answers to these questions inform our understanding of reach, engagement, and purpose.
  • Research expands understanding of social media use and broader understanding of societies.
  • Disciplines examining social media-related questions: marketing, communications, politics, computer science, human–computer interaction, economics, health, business, and education, among others.
Core Area 2: Methodological and Ethical Questions
  • Social media research prompts questions about its challenges.
  1. Methodological questions:
    • Emerge from collection, analysis, and visualization of social media data. Social media allows easy access to large data quantities but can be costly and difficult to obtain specific data sets. Twitter opened its archives to academic researchers in early 2021 (Tornes and Trujillo, 2021).
  2. Ethical questions:
    • Data collection and reporting raise ethical issues like personal privacy, accuracy, and accountability. Consent is often at the centre of debates. Ethical considerations are relevant in small-scale studies. Individuals need to better control personal data on the web. Unfolding legal challenges open new research questions for scholars.
  3. Questions of scale:
    • Scale is one of the most significant challenges. Both large and small-scale studies are relevant. New theoretical and methodological assumptions are needed to link and integrate distinct data sets and findings, and draw inferences based on social media data.

Key Issues to Consider in Social Media Research

  • Social media scholarship has grown rapidly since 2002.
  • Early work (2002-2010) examined single platforms, affordances, uses, and social implications.
  • Gross and Acquisti's (2005) paper looked at user engagement on Facebook, information sharing, and privacy implications.
  • Despite quick proliferation of research addressing questions linked to social media, three issues were often insufficiently considered:
  1. Social media use as part of a media repertoire:
    • Early work (2002 to 2010) looked at single platforms in isolation. As more platforms appeared, the single-platform approach no longer captured the richness of social media usage. Scholars should think of social media use as a toolkit where different platforms fulfil different uses and gratifications (Quan-Haase and Young, 2010). Boczkowski et al. (2018) confirmed the value in their study of social media among young adults in Argentina. Multi-platform use has significantly increased (Pew Research Center, 2018).
  2. Swiss army knife metaphor:
    • One of the biggest challenges in studying social media is its chameleon-like nature. Social media is not a technology 'that has reached closure by definition'. Social media continues to evolve in subtle and bold ways. Findings about a social media platform may be challenging to generalize across time. Media platforms integrate a wider range of features, capabilities, and services, they also start looking more alike. This trend necessitates two types of studies: one that examines a single social media platform in depths across user groups and features and calls for comparative research that provides a deeper understanding of why users prefer some platforms over others.
  3. Online–offline relation:
    • Examining social media often gives the impression that it is a universe unto itself. This perspective is myopic and disregards the many ways in which social media is closely interlinked (Hogan and Quan-Haase, 2010). Social media usage is interwoven with the rhythms and patterns of everyday life – be it romantic, family, community, or work. This link became evident in the analysis of social media usage during the Arab Spring. Social media needs to be studied as an expansion of daily life, an amplifier, and a catalyst. This will allow for an understanding of the more significant ramifications of social media in society and the many intersection points.
  4. Context:
    • The contexts in which interactions and behaviour on social media are occurring need to be considered. Without taking cultural, political, and historical contexts into account, researchers may miss essential aspects of social media use and its social implications. The #MeToo hashtag is one movement that demostrates the need to investigate social media in political and social context. Black women have been speaking publicly and politically about rape since at least the 1800s (Serisier, 2018) and Black activist Tarana Burke had founded the ‘Me Too’ movement years before it attracted mainstream attention on social media.

Conclusion

  • Defining social media is increasingly difficult.
  • Features, capabilities, and services are constantly changing.
  • Understanding of the role of social media in society is changing (Gillespie, 2018).
  • Definition stresses social purpose and contextual nature:
    • Social media are web-based and mobile services that allow individuals, communities, and organizations to collaborate, connect, interact, and build community by enabling them to create, co-create, modify, share, and engage with content (user- or bot-generated).
  • Many forms of software increasingly include social elements.
  • Many social media platforms adopt features that go beyond social connection and content sharing (e.g., banking, e-commerce, and donations).
  • Researchers should adopt a clear focus and be explicit about where their findings apply.
  • Researchers should be explicit about what form of social media is of interest.
  • Studies should include detailed descriptions of a platform's design and features.
  • Social media remains a fruitful area of research and a promising tool for data collection.
  • More research is needed to understand the biases inherent in using social media methodologies and develop best practices to support researchers and protect users.
  • Of particular importance is the need to determine best practices around ethical considerations.
  • There is much work to be done around the social phenomena under investigation on social media and how scholars are procuring, storing, interpreting, and making use of social media data.