Communication effectiveness of posts in online brand communities: A content analysis approach

Communication with customers in today's world has unique effects on marketing efforts. In the digital era of marketing, a specific way to implement digital strategies is to create and operate brand fan communities on social networking sites (e.g., Facebook and Twitter). Since the brand community encourages members to become loyal fans of the brand, marketers increasingly focus on brand communities based on the way they create value for their companies and their customers. Brands moderate these fan pages as a place to communicate with posts (including videos, messages, images, information, and other materials) to develop long-term relationships with customers, to increase customer loyalty, and to gain feedback on products and companies. The customers' subsequent reactions—reposting, commenting on, or liking the posts—reflects the popularity of the brand's post. The aim of the study is to investigate and discuss what factors affect brand post popularity. In order to investigate the possible drivers of popularity, this thesis selects four brands from two separate sectors, which are Toyota and Renault from durable goods sector, and Coca-Cola and PepsiCo from the fast-moving consumer goods sector. Official Turkish accounts for these brands are analyzed to determine the correlation between the driving factors and brand post popularity pairwise. In the literature, the results of the conceptual model proposed by de Vries, Gensler, and Leeflang (2012) show that interactivity is the most important factor affecting popularity; i.e. a higher level of interactivity would help boost popularity. Content type and vividness are the other factors that are positively correlated with brand post popularity (Ryan and Zabin 2010; Amir Hassan Zadeh and Ramesh Sharda 2014). For this reason, this study includes all these factors as the possible drivers of post popularity. In addition, the impact of different social media networks on post effectiveness has also been considered. Facebook and Twitter are chosen as two contrasting popular social media networks, in order to examine how they are used by the four different brands, and how the social networks differ. The brands used were Toyota and Renault for the durable goods sector and Coca-Cola and PepsiCo for fast moving consumer products. The findings of this research provide important insights to the managers responsible for administrating brand communities, namely to decide which characteristics and content should be included in brand posts. The results of the analysis also enable managers to make comparisons between different social media platforms in terms of communication content and strategies.