Social media consists of websites facilitating relationships between users from various backgrounds, resulting in a complex social structure. This article identifies multiple emergent themes in the existing corpus, advancing our knowledge of social media research advancements. It presents an integrated view of the current literature that can aid future researchers in avoiding duplication while providing fruitful lines of inquiry to help shape research in this emerging field.
Highlights:
- Facebook has a commanding lead over all other social media platforms.
- Businesses use social media primarily to hear from customers, fans, and other interested parties.
- Review and recommendation sites are prominent features of social media platforms.
By facilitating communication and connection between people from different walks of life, social media sites have helped to create a resilient social order (Abbas et al., 2019). The creation of vast amounts of data is a key feature of this architecture, and it provides a unique benefit to the users of the system as a whole (Aji et al., 2013). However, users’ inability to locate reliable information that is useful to them at the time of need is sometimes a clear manifestation of such information overload (Fernández et al., 2014). People use social media sites for everything from getting the latest news and updates on critical events to getting their daily dose of entertainment to finding local businesses they can support to satisfying their emotional needs to managing their careers and keeping up with the latest hashtag trends (Merchant & Lurie, 2020).
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