A Netnographic Analysis of Facebook Content Strategy of World's Top 10 Management Institutes

Introduction

Since Muniz and O’Guinn (2001) introduced the concept of Brand Community (BC) it has drawn substantial attention in the marketing literature by academicians. They conceptualized BC as, “specialized, non-geographically bound community, based on structured set of social relations among admirers of a brand” (Muniz and O’Guinn, 2001) and proposed that BCs would exhibit three traditional community characteristics– shared consciousness, rituals and traditions, moral responsibility (Muniz and O'Guinn, 2001, p. 413). In the pre-Internet era, brands connected with their community members in offline World, the most commonly referred example being Harley Davidson community (McAlexander et al., 2002). However, with the penetration of Internet, virtual communities (Armstrong and Hagel III, 1996) came into existence. In the post 2000 period, with the proliferation of social media (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010; Mangold and Faulds, 2009), brands realized the incremental benefit of establishing their communities on these social media websites (Laroche et al., 2012). The value additional features on social media websites (SMWs) have further strengthened brands to have real-time customer engagement (Van Doorn et al., 2010) at a much accelerated pace than it was possible in any of the traditional media channels. It has been observed that BCs created on SMWs have positive impact on customer/product, customer/brand, customer/company and customer/other customers relationships (Laroche et al., 2013, Papagiannidis et al 2013). On the other hand, customers and stakeholders of a brand also find it convenient and effective to converse with brands through these SMWs (Kietzmann et al., 2011; Baird and Parasnis, 2011; Fisher, 2009).

In order to ensure effective customer engagement which has a strong probability to build brand loyalty among community members (Brodie et al., 2013; Goldsmith, 2011; Hollebeek, 2011; Malhotra et al., 2013) brands need to follow a well-planned content strategy. However, it isn’t an easy task for brands to create effective content on a regular basis. Hence, some brands become successful on social media while others don’t. It is a huge challenge for brands to formulate their content strategy for building and sustaining high customer engagement on these BCs created on SMWs (Malhotra et al., 2013; Drury, 2008). As part of their content strategy, BCs share necessary information about and around the brand to community members, and help organization build a strong brand (Fournier and Lee, 2009).