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Top1. Introduction
Social networking site (SNS), e.g., Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, has become a popular communication tool for enterprises due to the advantages of synchronous interaction and communication with multiple parties and without geographical constraints (Kaur, Dhir, & Rajala, 2016). Specifically, for small and medium sized enterprises (SME), the use of SNS can bring them a lot of benefits, such as increasing exposure, enhancing brand attractiveness, improving sales, reducing marketing expenses, and developing loyal fans (Icha & Edwin, 2016; Kaur et al., 2016). SNS, hence, is adopted by various enterprises as an important practice for relationship marketing in both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) contexts (Icha & Edwin, 2016). Nowadays, more and more companies present themselves on SNSs by establishing brand communities to maintain continuous interaction with existing and potential customers to influence their brand choices (Banerjee & Banerjee, 2015) and cultivate brand loyalty (Kaur et al., 2016; Muniz & O'Guinn, 2001).
Muniz and O'Guinn (2001)
defined a brand community as “a specialized, non-geographically bound community, based on a structured set of social relations among admirers of a brand” (p.412). Through the computer-mediated communication pattern of a brand community, enterprises can collect customers’ information (Muniz & O'Guinn, 2001) to facilitate innovation of their products and services (Kaur et al., 2016; Schau, Muñiz, & Arnould, 2014). Brand community can be regarded as a kind of open innovation with knowledge from external sources. For example, LEGO has quested and adopted open innovation from consumers to improve its successful LEGO robotic kit Mindstorms, and skinnyCorp’s Threadless has employed user innovation to manufacture consumer-designed and critiqued T-shirts (Schau et al., 2014). Within a brand community, consumers can interact with the brand, with company employees, and with other consumers (Muniz & O'Guinn, 2001), and thereby their needs, wants and opinions can be heard and be satisfied. Consequently, a brand community is crucial for developing new product or service and managing consumer-brand, consumer-consumer, and consumer-marketer relationships as well (Banerjee & Banerjee, 2015; Kelley & Alden, 2015; Simon, Brexendorf, & Fassnacht, 2016).