Brand Community Success Factors: A Study of Two Facebook Brand Community Features

The purpose of this paper was to determine how to create a successful social media brand community in terms of both size and active participation on social media. This paper employed qualitative content analysis of six brand communities across two different social media platforms: the ‘Addicted To ’and ‘Like ’feature of Facebook. The ease of finding the social media brand community was most impactful on the number of members, while the presence of a discussion board (fulfilling social motives) and the presence of games to fulfill entertainment motives increased participation in the community. The current study focused upon two features on Facebook, one of which has shut down. Furthermore, it only explored six communities-all focused upon entertainment products (e.g. movies and TV shows). The current study provides key insights into how to increase engagement on brand communities by simply adding features to existing communities, which has real implications for marketers attempting to gain benefits from social media brand communities. Although general motives for participation have been discussed in the past, this paper provides concrete suggestions for how to encourage brand members to fulfill these needs within brand communities.