Social Affordance: The human/technological meeting point for Social Media Marketing. *Mehmet I Mehmet University of Wollongong,
[email protected] Social affordance refers to elements of a system or technology, which allow engagement of social actions (Hogan, 2010). The study aims to demonstrate the usefulness of social affordance in assisting marketers’ selection of appropriate social media sites for communication. Additionally, it offers a framework to understand the ‘rules of engagement’ associated with individual social media sites. This is of particular interest, as marketing budgets are increasingly directed towards social media and understanding how and where to communicate is becoming increasingly vital for the success of marketing campaigns. Tumblr will be used to demonstrate the effectiveness of social affordance. Findings indicate that traditional text-based messages should not be solely relied upon when communicating with savvy users. Therefore, marketers interested in utilising Tumblr must be willing to communicate using creative images. Marketers must avoid mundane and predictable messages, whilst leveraging the interactive Web 2.0 capabilities of the site to engage with users. Keywords: Social Affordance, Social Media, Tumblr Track: Digital Marketing and Social Media
