The role of content marketing in social media content communities

TLDR

Content marketing, a leading digital marketing technique, builds consumer relationships by sharing engaging content on social media, yet its role within social media content communities has been largely overlooked by prior research focused on marketing and virtual brand communities. This article investigates how content marketing functions within social media content communities to engage target audiences naturally. The authors conducted a directed, inductive content analysis of 51 practitioner documents using QDA Miner to examine business‑to‑consumer content marketing practices in social media communities. The analysis identified three categories—building content communities, platform‑specific content, and channel understanding—demonstrating that brands use content communities to connect with audiences unobtrusively, distinguishing them from virtual brand communities and showing how content marketing can become part of social media conversations.

Abstract

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.