Tag Archives: brand communities

What is engagement on Facebook and why is it important?

Customer engagement in Facebook has emerged as a topic of great interest for consultants and marketing managers due to their interest in finding out about the nature of the connections between online brand communities and their target audience and to understand which factors determine the engagement factor among brands and followers in this social network.

Traditionally, Facebook has portrayed the engagement factor as the sum of certain metrics contained in its social plug-ins, such as the number of reactions (like, love, laugh, surprised, sad and angry), comments and amplifications (shares) divided by the total number of likes of a certain fanpage.

Such measurement seeks to determine the degree of connection and empathy between the actions developed by brands and their followers. However, for some marketing professionals such variables don’t describe other important elements that also affect the way in which their content captures followers’ attention or to find relevant insights that reflects brands’ ability to engage customers.

Other ways to determine engagement in Facebook.

Multiple methodologies have been developed by marketing researchers with the idea of expanding the spectrum of possibilities that help to understand the engagement factor in Facebook, ranging from mathematical models that aim to measure certain “key performance indicators” (KPI’s: Key Performance Indicators) to theoretical methodologies based on advertisement and psychology theories.

For instance, some methodologies embrace engagement from the analysis of the interactions between the brands and their followers in Facebook, categorizing the posts that communicate humor, emotions or the brands’ philanthropic actions as a high engagement generators while the content that communicates prices and items availability as low engagement generators.

In the other side, some methodologies propose mathematical models based on the measurement of a matrix of variables such as:

  • The number of “posts” published during a given campaign.
  • The number of followers of a publication.
  • The number of videos, pictures and links shared.
  • The status updates of the Facebook campaign or brand page.

Even though, these methodologies try to evaluate Facebook engagement from various areas of knowledge, they don’t delineate a holistic approach that encompasses theories from different sciences combined with a statistical model.

The development of more comprehensive methodologies, can help marketers to obtain more in-depth insights about how is engagement created in Facebook and to determine which key factors characterize the relationships between online brand communities and their followers on Internet-based applications.

Facebook engagement variables

Facebook engagement variables

What is the importance of online brand communities in product design?

The concept of community has been defined as a group of persons that build through different signs or actions a sense of identity and belonging to such group. This definition has taken new connotations since the emergence of the web 2.0 and the rise of virtual communities.

Within the fabric of meanings that describe virtual communities, the “online brand communities”, have spawned great interest among product engineers and marketing professionals as the interaction generated in such spaces have become significant sources of market intelligence.

Some theoretical principles of digital anthropology, suggest that if a group of consumers admire and follow a brand in a virtual community, a process of class consciousness is developed through multiple rituals that reproduce the sense of belonging to the community and foster the affective bonds among members and the brand.

For some companies, learning about online brand communities’ rituals and traditions has been crucial in order to gather key customers’ behavior information. Moreover, such learning approaches have helped companies to exploit the affective bonds that connect community members with the brand, generating dynamics of active participation with mutual benefits for both parties.

How can brands interact in online brand communities to design products?

A successful business case of active participation happened between the Danish manufacturer of plastic toys, Lego Corp. and the followers of the brand who interact in the online community; Lugnet (www.lugnet.biz). The interaction between Lugnet and LEGO Corp. is determined by LEGO’s necessity to know what kind of products Lugnet members would like the company to produce and buy.

In order to capitalize the interactions created with Lugnet, LEGO corp. designed a strategy aimed to encourage Lugnet members to participate in a contest to design different products that they would like LEGO corp. to produce.

During the contest, LEGO provided a software of prototypes to the community so members could design a specific product online and share the design with other members. Once the leaders of Lugnet in partnership with the engineering department of LEGO Corp. choose the winning model, the company developed the product, rewarding the most active members in the contest.

LEGO strategy of empowering Lugnet members to take part of its product design process was beneficial for both parts: On the one hand, LEGO benefited from gathering key business information that improves product sales and customer satisfaction. On the other hand, Lugnet members buy products designed by themselves while reinforcing the affective ties with the brand and with other community members.

online brand community ecosystem