Functional domains of social media platforms: Structuring the uses of Facebook to better understand its gratifications

Social media pose serious challenges for uses-and-gratifications research, such as the entangled use of contemporary media services. This paper proposes a measurement approach which addresses this challenge. We build on the conceptualization of Facebook as a toolkit of features (Smock, Ellison, Lampe, & Wohn, 2011) in order to search for functional domains underlying the individual usage of Facebook features. These functional domains enable us...