The role of content marketing in social media content communities

South African Journal of Information Management

 
 
Field Value
 
Title The role of content marketing in social media content communities
 
Creator du Plessis, Charmaine
 
Subject marketing communication branding; content marketing; digital marketing; social media; social media content communities; social media marketing
Description Background: Content marketing has become a leading marketing technique in digital marketing communication and uses the point of view of consumers to build relationships by creating and sharing engaging content in social media that enhance their daily lives. Existing research on social media communities has focused mainly on social media marketing and virtual brand community perspectives while content marketing’s valuable and unobtrusive role in social media content communities has largely been overlooked.Objective: The purpose of this article was to investigate content marketing’s role in social media content communities to engage with the target audience in an innate manner.Method: This study made use of a directed, inductive content analysis of 51 practitioner documents relating to business-to-consumer content marketing practices to add another perspective to existing research on communities in social media. The content analysis was facilitated by using QDA Miner, a widely adopted and reliable qualitative data analysis software programme.Results: Three categories emerged from the data namely building content communities, platform-specific content and understanding channels. These categories provide sufficient evidence of how brands make use of social media content communities to connect with the target audience in an unobtrusive manner, in addition to being present in virtual brand communities.Conclusion: The findings make several contributions to the existing literature. Firstly, it provides a clearer distinction between brand and social media content communities. Secondly, it extends conceptions about social media communities to include content communities and, thirdly, it provides sufficient evidence of how content marketing could benefit a brand by naturally becoming part of social media conversations.
 
Publisher AOSIS
 
Contributor
Date 2017-10-05
 
Type info:eu-repo/semantics/article info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion — Content analysis
Format text/html application/epub+zip text/xml application/pdf
Identifier 10.4102/sajim.v19i1.866
 
Source SA Journal of Information Management; Vol 19, No 1 (2017); 7 pages 1560-683X 2078-1865
 
Language eng
 
Relation
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https://sajim.co.za/index.php/sajim/article/view/866/1160 https://sajim.co.za/index.php/sajim/article/view/866/1159 https://sajim.co.za/index.php/sajim/article/view/866/1161 https://sajim.co.za/index.php/sajim/article/view/866/1158
 
Coverage — — —
Rights Copyright (c) 2017 Charmaine du Plessis https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
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