Chapter 6: Social community
Chapter overview
In part 3, we focus on the four zones of social media, which form the options for social media
marketing strategies. Chapter 6 is about social community, the first zone of social media
marketing. Companies can and should participate organically but increasingly they must use paid
media in chosen social network sites (SNSs) to effectively reach their target audiences. The
chapter reviews best practices for organic participation and guidelines for using paid advertising.
Running Case: 221BC Embraces Friendvertising
Critical Reflection: Deep Fakes Threaten Social Media Trust
Teaching tips and resources
To emphasise the effectiveness of a brand’s social network presence, instructors may wish
to assign this assignment:
• Analyse a brand profile on Facebook. Consider Gallaugher and Ransbotham’s 3M
Model. Does the brand use social media for megaphone, magnet and monitor
posts? How engaging is each type of post? What are the implications?
Learning objectives
When students finish reading this chapter, they will be able to answer these questions:
1. How do social networking communities enable user participation and sharing?
2. In what ways can brands utilise social networking communities for branding and
promotion?
Chapter outline
I. The Social Community Zone
• Figure 6.1 illustrates the social community zone.
• It can be thought of as the relationship zone.
A. Characteristics of SNS
1. SNS all maintain the basic network structure we discussed in Chapter 3 –
nodes that interact with one another, flows between node members and
graphs connected to others by way of node relationships.
2. They vary in three different dimensions:
• udience and degree of specialisation
• Social objects that mediate the relationships among members
• Degree of decentralisation or openness
3. Audience Specialisation
• An internal social network provides a method of communication and
collaboration that is more dynamic and interactive.
• An external social network is open to people who are not
affiliated with the site’s sponsor.
6. Identity portability is such that a single profile would provide access
across SNS with a single login and shared information.
B. Social Networking Activities
1. Social sharing provides people with the tools they need to reveal elements
of their digital identities.
2. Secondary content consists of things that others create which we feel are
worth redistributing to our social networks, such as retweets, links to a
celebrity blog, or even brands we ‘like’ on our Facebook page.
II. Marketing Applications in the Social Community Zone
A. Social Presence: Brands as Relationship Nodes
1. When a brand profile launches on SNS, the brands exist much as people do on
the sites.
B. Brand Participation and Friendvertising
1. Organic reach is the number of people you can reach for free by posting.
2. Earned reach is the breadth and quality of contact with users gained when people
share positive brand opinions and branded content with others is invaluable
because of the influence attributed to individual, personalised brand
endorsements.
4. Figure 6.2 illustrates why people friend brands on social media,
C. Post Content and Type
1. Gallaugher and Ransbotham’s 3M Model of social media dialogue management is
useful for conceptualising approaches to firm-generated content (FGC):
• Megaphone: the company broadcast posts
III. Driving Brand Engagement
• Brands enhance participation by providing experiences for users that are
worth participating in and telling others about. Experiences may involve any
of the four zones, but the zone of social community is where conversations
take place in and around the experiences.
A. Brand Fans
1. An online community is a fandom.
2. There are five characteristics of a brand fan:
• Emotional engagement: The object is meaningful in the emotional life
of the fan.
• Self-identification: The fan personally and publicly identifies with like-
minded fans.
3. The fan base is an indicator of the brand’s success in establishing a known
presence within a community.
4. Return on emotion conceptually assesses the extent to which a brand has
delivered a value in exchange for the emotional attachment fans have
awarded it.
B. Real-Time Marketing
1. Real-time marketing is the use of social media in the moment to share a
brand-relevant message.
2. Oreo created this phenomenon with its ‘dunk in the dark’ tweet during the
2013 Super Bowl.
C. Contests and Requests for UGC
1. User-generated content (UGC) campaigns offer a way for brands to invite
consumers to engage and interact while they develop shareable content.
D. Brand Social Communities
1. Brands can develop and engage communities (called an embedded brand
community) using existing SNS like Facebook or develop its own
independent, online community (called an online brand community or
OBC).
2. The State of Social Engagement report scored 85 brands on the quality of
their social community engagement including several categories: (1)
IV. Paid Media in Social Networks
• Facebook’s algorithm is based on thousands of variables designed to assign a
relevancy score for each piece of content that could be exposed to a user.
• This is bad news for marketers. Studies suggest that organic reach may be as
low as 2% and no higher than 16%. In other words, even a brand with a
million fans will only reach 20,000 of the fans with each post.
A. Advertising Types
1. Display ads may include text, graphics, video and sound much like
traditional print ads and commercials but they are presented on a website
and are enhanced with a response device in that viewers can click the ads
(called a clickthrough).
2. A landing page is the first page that a person sees when he or she clicks
through an ad to reach a brand’s target site.
B. Enhancing Paid Ads with Sociality
1. Social ads are online display ads that incorporate user data in the ad or in
the targeting of the ad and enable some form of social interaction within
the ad unit or landing page.
• A social engagement ad contains ad creative (image and text) along
with an option to encourage the viewer to engage with the brand (e.g.
a clickable ‘Like’ button or a link).
V. Elements of Ad Design
A. Although advertising can include photos and videos, interactivity such as in-
ad mini-games, links and text, the typical Facebook ad includes six elements:
headline, text, description, caption, call to action and image.
1. Figure 6.8 illustrates the typical Facebook ad.
B. An Echoverse is defined as the entire communications environment in which
a brand/firm operates, with actors contributing and being influenced by each
other’s actions.
VI. Is the Brand Ready for Social Relationships?
Managers should ask these questions before deciding whether social relationships will
work for a specific brand.
• Is the brand set up for engagement?
• How can the brand’s profiles be developed in such a way as to reflect the
brand’s personality? With what voice will the brand speak? How will the
brand interact within the site?
• If ‘fan pages’ exist among brand loyalists on SNS, how can the brand
leverage the fan sites to better meet its objectives?
• How can the brand integrate its social network presence into other campaign
components?
Chapter summary
1. How do social networking communities enable user participation and sharing?
People participate around experiences. Brands aid in this by providing experience strategies that
relate to their marketing objectives. Social media networks provide a structure for social
2. In what ways can brands utilise social networking communities for branding and
promotion?
Brands have three key ways of utilising social networking communities for branding based around
owned, earned and paid media. Brands should develop a social presence in the chosen social
3. How can brands reach consumers organically using SNSs? What characteristics do brand
fans exhibit?
Facebook defines the number of people you can reach for free by posting as organic reach. Brand
participation in SNS enables brands to share information about brand benefits and special deals,
provide customer care and build relationships by engaging in conversations with consumers in the
4. What forms of paid media can be used in social communities? Why is paid media
important to social media marketers?
Just as brands may advertise on websites throughout the Web, they may also choose to advertise
within social communities. As companies recognise the limits of organic reach and ad impressions,
they are turning to paid media options in SNS. Paid media may take the form of standard display