Article Preview
Top1. Introduction
A growing number of consumers use social networks to express and disseminate their knowledge, experiences, and opinions about products and services. The social network and sharing platform function as platforms to facilitate interaction among consumers and the formation of brand communities. (Muñiz & O'Guinn, 2001; Muñiz & Schau, 2005, 2006). Consequently, many enterprises created their brand fan pages in the social network as their virtual brand communities. Those fan pages create a community of consumers who interact with the company through liking or commenting on brand posts or through sharing information (Bushelow, 2012). There has been evidence that brand fan page or many firms outperforms official websites in terms of consumer traffic (Neff, 2010; Zastrow, 2013). As such, building a community brand is essential to developing the company's brand while increasing the ability of interaction between the company and the customer.
The recent innovation of social network - based brand communities provide companies with benefits such as greater accessibility to customers, lower costs and higher communication efficiency (Laroche, 2012). Virtual brand communities are known as specialized, structured, and non – geographically bond, with no constraint, allowing continuous communications between many to many members. In addition, the willingness of customers to share or respond to products and services is an opportunity for marketers to grasp customers better by paying attention to discussing values from social networks. Thus, they can assess accurately customer’s satisfaction level, discover new customer’s needs and find important features to target in the media. Based on this practical information, the company can provide marketing strategies for potential products or develop and improve products based on customers' practical needs. Consumers can also form and manage many successful online or virtual brand communities in which they can influence other members to voluntarily perform various community behaviors like intention of membership, recommendation, active participation, and the like. Several studies show that virtual community is a crucial reference for the members. Prior to making a decision for purchases, participants can collect information, get consultancy or advice from an expert user on virtual communities. Even for post-purchase stage, customers may share their experiences of consumption to the community (De Valck et al., 2009). In this way, customer virtual communities clearly have a vast influence on consumers and become more dependable than commercial communities (Bickart & Schindler, 2001; Brodie et al., 2013), but customer communities may also be disadvantageous to a company as negative messages from unsatisfied consumers could threaten brand image (Maclaran & Catterall, 2002).