Platform Affordances Shape Consumer Relationships and Purchase Decisions

Influencer posts are now a primary source of product information and shopping inspiration, often more trusted than traditional advertisements. Influencers offer not just product details, but also relational and emotional value, functioning as trusted information sources and even remote friends with whom followers develop affective ties. This unique blend of informational and emotional support is the root of influencers' persuasive power.

While much attention has been paid to the influencers themselves and their followers, the crucial role of the underlying "platforms" in this dynamic has often been overlooked. This article, drawing on recent research, will delve into how distinct platform characteristics, known as technology affordances, impact followers' information seeking and affective relationship building with influencers, ultimately influencing their purchase intentions. Understanding these affordances provides nuanced, durable insights, even as the social media landscape rapidly evolves.

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Exploring the dynamics of consumer engagement in social media influencer marketing: from the self-determination theory perspective

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The Power of Platform Affordances

The concept of affordance refers to the relationship between the properties of a technology and the capabilities of its users, determining how the technology can be used. In the context of social media, this means understanding how a platform's design features enable or constrain user activities. Instead of viewing platforms as monolithic entities, the affordance perspective allows us to focus on specific characteristics that shape communication processes and consumer behaviors.

Research highlights two essential social media affordances: visibility and engagement. Within these broader categories, specific "micro-level" affordances play a critical role in influencer marketing by affecting how followers seek information and build emotional connections (affective trust) with influencers.

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Here’s a breakdown of the key affordances and their impact:

• Product Visibility: This affordance describes how effectively product images, information, and knowledge are presented and easily accessed on a platform. Features like multimedia publishing and content formatting contribute to it.
  • Impact on Information Seeking: Higher product visibility on a platform is positively associated with consumers' willingness to seek information from influencers on that platform. Consumers actively or passively access diverse knowledge sources on social media due to this visibility, which improves the efficiency of their information gathering and helps them make informed purchase decisions.
• Visibility Control: This refers to the extent to which communication with an intended recipient can be kept private from other users. Functions like direct messages and privacy settings support this affordance.
  • Impact on Affective Trust Building: Platforms offering greater visibility control are positively associated with the development of affective trust. The ability to communicate privately encourages self-disclosure, fostering personal, sincere, and intimate interactions that build affective ties and trust between influencers and followers.
• Triggered Engagement: This affordance relates to a user's perception of how effortlessly and timely they can stay engaged with content related to their interests. Automated alerts, content posting functions, and content prioritizing algorithms are examples of features that enable triggered engagement.
  • Impact on Information Seeking: Triggered engagement is positively associated with information seeking. Immediate and effortless updates about products of interest stimulate curiosity and encourage consumers to actively seek more information, such as when a fashion influencer posts a new shopping haul video that appears automatically in a personalized feed.
• Social Presence Engagement: This describes the feeling that interactants are near and sharing the same experience, stemming from a platform's technological properties like media formats and interaction functions. It creates a sense of "being there together".
  • Impact on Information Seeking: Social presence engagement is positively associated with information seeking. Consumers often prefer information from channels with high social presence because they value directly acquired information and a sense of parasocial interaction, which encourages them to seek more from the source.
  • Impact on Affective Trust Building: Social presence engagement is strongly and positively associated with affective trust development. It enables users to connect, socialize, and form emotional bonds, indicating benevolence and fostering trust in online settings.
• Synchronous Engagement: Also known as immediacy, this affordance refers to the degree to which a platform enables instant conversations and immediate responses. Features include instant messaging, notifications, and comment/reply functions.
  • Impact on Affective Trust Building: While it has limited impact on information seeking (which primarily involves content consumption), synchronous engagement is positively associated with affective trust building. More frequent and deeper real-time communications foster greater emotional attachment, social support, and trust, shortening psychological and emotional distances.

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The Link to Purchase Intention

These platform affordances don't just shape follower activities; they ultimately contribute to marketing outcomes. The research confirms that both information seeking and affective trust are directly linked to a consumer's purchase intention:

• Information Seeking and Purchase Intention: Consumers' information seeking from an influencer is positively associated with their purchase intention of products recommended by that influencer. Seeking information from trusted sources acts as a risk-handling strategy, increasing purchase intentions by reducing perceived risk and uncertainty.
• Affective Trust and Purchase Intention: Similarly, consumers' affective trust in an influencer is positively associated with their purchase intention of recommended products. When consumers emotionally trust influencers, they are more willing to rely on their recommendations for purchase decisions.

Crucially, the study also reveals that information seeking and affective trust building often mediate the relationships between these platform affordances and consumers' purchase intentions. This means platform features influence follower activities, which then, in turn, drive purchase decisions.

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Platform-Specific Nuances: Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook

While the concept of affordances provides a general framework, their strengths and specific impacts can vary across different platforms, reflecting their unique digital environments and user motives. The study examined Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook, revealing important differences:

• Instagram: On Instagram, social presence engagement was the strongest predictor for both information seeking and affective trust building. This is likely because Instagram is typically used for casual, quick, and daily social interactions, where visually appealing photos and short videos with simple captions dominate, and influencers post frequently. Consumers on Instagram highly value the feeling of connection and shared experience.
• YouTube: For YouTube, product visibility and triggered engagement were the strongest predictors of information seeking. This aligns with YouTube's reputation for long-form, tutorial, and review-style videos, where consumers seek high-quality, in-depth product information, and influencers may post less frequently.
• Facebook: On Facebook, triggered engagement was the strongest predictor for information seeking. Interestingly, while social presence engagement was a strong predictor for affective trust, synchronous engagement did not significantly contribute to it. This suggests that affective trust on Facebook may not depend on real-time interactions, but rather on the feeling of "being there together" supported by features like groups, virtual events, and polls. Additionally, product visibility was not found to be relevant to information seeking on Facebook, possibly due to the prevalence of written content on the platform.

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Strategic Implications for Brand Marketers

These findings offer powerful tactical and strategic guidance for brands integrating influencer marketing into their plans:

• Optimize for Information Seeking: To help consumers find product information, platforms (and thus, influencer content strategy) need to prioritize timely updates about products of interest, illustrate product attributes authentically, and create a strong sense of social presence.
• Cultivate Affective Relationships: To foster deeper emotional bonds and trust between influencers and followers, platforms should facilitate immediate and private conversations, alongside improving the feeling of social presence.
• Leverage Platform Strengths:
  • Implement effective ranking algorithms to display the most relevant content.
  • Develop sophisticated notification systems that allow consumers to customize the types of content they want to be notified of.
  • Support various media formats (e.g., videos for detailed views and social presence; pictures for quick looks or low connectivity) to enhance product visibility and social presence.
  • Consider livestreaming as a promising feature to embed, as it significantly enhances both visibility and engagement.
  • Devise better interaction systems that allow for quick, direct, and private communications, addressing the need for a balance between visibility and invisibility.

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Strategically, brands must explicitly consider how different social media platforms vary in these affordances when developing their influencer marketing strategies. Media managers of social platforms can also use these distinct characteristics as differentiators in the competitive social media landscape.

By understanding and strategically leveraging the specific affordances of social media platforms, brand marketers and agencies can optimize their influencer campaigns to drive more effective information seeking, build stronger emotional connections, and ultimately, convert more consumers into buyers.