The Impact Of Brand Communities Embedded On Social Networking Sites On Brand Commitment

(2) A network of friends, colleagues, and other personal contacts. (3) An online community of people with a common interest who use a website or other technologies to communicate with each other and share information or resources. Social Network sites is defined as web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with who they share a connections, and (3) view and navigate their list of connections and those made by others within the system. These social network sites are named as such but not limited to: Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, and

* Fostering brand communities. Social networking is playing an important role in the rapid spread of brand communities, groups of people united by their interest in and ownership or use of particular products.

While this article places more emphasis upon the behaviour of groups and individuals, the theme is still centered on social media sites and celebrities. One of the aspects in this study is researching the characteristics of these groups and identifying reasons as to why these groups show continued support celebrity brands and marketing practices. This can be considered an outlook spawned from the increasing use of social media by celebrities and can be used as comparison between older methods and social media.

Using the multitude of resources the authors draw from, they study the results of a survey of several hundred companies using online marketing in order to determine the best practices for those advertising strategies. The authors ascertain that social media marketing is only as effective as the prevailing psychological factors in which social media works. These factors are inherent in human communication, not only on the internet, but in the real world as well. The authors state that there are communities of people using social media and that “these communities often thrive because the members primarily are drawn to one another. The importance of person-to-person affinity – and the ability to interact with these other humans – typically trumped the role of the sponsor’s goods or services or the presence of other features in the online communities.” (Moran 232) What the authors are saying is that social media is a new tool in order to bring similar consumers together and that if a company wants to be successful in social media marketing, they must concentrate on the human connection rather than their product or services.

The rise of social media has been a global phenomenon since internet giant Facebook began, with one in seven people having a Facebook account (Hennig-Thurau, Hofacker & Bloching 2013). This has had an impact on the marketing environment in several ways, with the two most notable being increased active participation and a strong level of networked interconnectedness (Hennig-Thurau, Hofacker & Bloching 2013). These two changes have shifted the power from the marketer to the consumer, as the regular consumer now has access to vast amounts of information and has the ability to amplify their opinion globally (Labrecque et al. 2013). For this reason, it may be argued that in the 21st century, marketing occurs among consumers, and is no longer purely

This scholarly journal article was written by Denni Arli, a marketing professor at Griffith University, Australia. Dr. Arli is highly qualified and experienced in conducting studies using different methodologies like depth interviews, systematic reviews and surveys. The article examines how features of social media impact on consumer attitudes towards social media and how this affects people’s loyalty to brands. The researcher found out that entertainment has the biggest impact on the attitudes of the consumers towards social media activity of a brand. The findings of the study also suggest that the informativeness and usefulness of social media positively affect attitudes of the consumers. The author of the article demonstrated that the attitude

When any consumer likes a Facebook page, monitors a brand via Twitter or relates with a brand's existence on various social media networks like YouTube, Google+ or Twitter, a connection forms between the brand and the customer (Hennig-Thurau, et al., 2010). 19% of customers buy "often," and twenty nine percent of the customers buy “sometimes” due to their bonding with the brand. “There is a definite correlation between a customer liking a brand online and consumer's possibility to buy that brand," according to Social Vibe CMO John Capano. "People often follow brands on social media sites not because they find them adorable but because they want to acquire something," pointed Lieb. All Likes may not be equal (Libai, et al., 2010).

Marketing goes beyond one-time buyers or brand recognition; it is about retaining a solid loyalty base. Historically, brands have centered loyalty programs around the point of purchase. However, through leveraging social media and other forms of user-generated content, loyalty programs can create more points of contact with the consumer. For retail brands, engagement-based loyalty can create several opportunities to interact directly with customers, rather than relying on their store-front locations; plus, pull more accurate data.

Hudson, Simon, Li Huang, Martin S. Roth, and Thomas J. Madden. "The influence of social media interactions on consumer–brand relationships: A three-country study of brand perceptions and marketing behaviors." International Journal of Research in Marketing 33.1 (2016): 27-41.

Social networking is a way of connecting people in the virtual world. Social networking websites have exploded in recent years,

In today’s business world, social media is being discussed on a daily basis. This phenomenon has taken over the marketing and advertising industries and has changed the way they handle their efforts to attract customers. There is a big misunderstanding that social media are only popular networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, but as defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary, social media are “forms of electronic communication (as Web sites for social networking and micro blogging) through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (as videos).” The rise of these online communities has given companies an opportunity to engage in conversations with their customers. This in

In recent years, social media has become the best available option for brands to communicate with prospective consumers. In other words, social media is an opportunity for brands to transcend the traditional middleman (Neti, 2011). One of the many positives is that companies can build their own brand communities easily on the social media. There are some obvious benefits of brand communities which are facilitating information sharing, spread the history and the culture of brands, providing help to customers, and positively influencing brand loyalty (Laroche, Habibi and Richard, 2013).

The relation brand-consumer changed aspect. The brands have to watch henceforth what people say of them on these social media and to begin the dialogue with their consumers to make sure to keep a good "e-reputation" and to enter a relational optics with their customers. But they can also benefit from these digital social networks to try to create consumers' community on-line "ambassadors" around them, to federate them and to develop loyalty of them thanks to a communication and specific tools.

Brand community is a customer-customer-brand triad. It reflects on a collection of brand-centric social group

According to the content above, it is clearly to see brand awareness is the most important goal for multinational firms, Tomi Jokinen has undertaken a study about brand awareness on social media in 2016. Jokinen (2016) stated that brand awareness is a very important in brand equity, and increasing brand awareness is usually one of the most important goals of branding. “Brand recognition refers to the consumer’s ability to recognize a brand when presented with a visual or a verbal cue. Brand recall on the other hand refers to the consumer’s ability to remember a brand name when thinking about the category it is linked to.” (Percy and Rossiter 1992, 265). Simultaneously, Jokinen (2016) demonstrated that on social media users can engage in direct conversation with brands and with each other, which makes it a good platform for relationship and word-of-mouth marketing. Here is two-directional vertical engagement can be seen in Figure 1. (Blanchard, 2011, 10)