پیشرفت در تحقیقات رسانه های اجتماعی: گذشته، حال و آینده Advances in Social Media Research: Past, Present and Future

1 Introduction Social media allows relationship forming between users from distinct backgrounds, resulting in a tenacious social structure. A prominent output of this structure is the generation of massive amounts of information, offering users exceptional service value proposition. However, a drawback of such information overload is sometimes evident in users’ inability to find credible information of use to them at the time of need. Social media sites are already so deeply embedded in our daily lives that people rely on them for every need, ranging from daily news and updates on critical events to entertainment, connecting with family and friends, reviews and recommendations on products/ services and places, fulfilment of emotional needs, workplace management, and keeping up with the latest in hashion, to name but a few. When we refer to social media, applications such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Instagram often come to mind. These applications are driven by user-generated content, and are highly influential in a myriad of settings, from purchasing/selling behaviours, entrepreneurship, political issues, to venture capitalism (Greenwood and Gopal 2015). As of April 2017, Facebook enjoys the exalted position of being the market leader of the social media world, with 1.97 billion monthly users (Statista 2017). In addition to posts, social media sites are bombarded with photo and video uploads, and according to the recent numbers, about 400 million snaps a day have been recorded on Snapchat, with around 9000 photos being shared every second (Lister 2017). While 50 million businesses are active on Facebook business pages, two million businesses are using Facebook advertising. Apparently, 88% businesses use Twitter for marketing purposes (Lister 2017). Academics and practitioners have explored and examined the many sides of social media over the past years. Organizations engage in social media mostly with the aim of obtaining feedback from stakeholders (Phang et al. 2015). Consumer reviews are another big part of social media, bringing issues of information quality, credibility, and authenticity to the forefront. To a large extent, online communities have been successful in bringing together people with similar interests and goals, making the concept of micro blogging very popular. While most messages exchanged on social media sites are personal statuses or updates on current affairs, some posts are support seeking, where people are looking for assistance and help. Interestingly, these have been recognized as socially exhausting posts that engender social overload, causing other members to experience negative behavioural and psychological consequences, because they feel compelled to respond (Maier et al. 2015a)