Social media affordances: Enabling customer engagement

•We introduce the theoretical lens of affordance to research in tourism.•We identify three distinctive social media affordances.•We examine how social media can be appropriately leveraged by hospitality ventures.•We extended prior research on customer engagement.

Despite the acknowledged importance of social media for customer engagement, our understanding of this phenomenon is limited and new theories can help shed further light on the unique features of social media in the tourism context. Our work contributes to the literature by adopting an affordance perspective that leads us to identify three distinctive social media affordances for customer engagement in tourism: persistent engagement, customized engagement, and triggered engagement. Our work also extends prior research on customer engagement by examining the process of recognition (proprioception, exteroception and coperception) through which organizations engage customers in social media.