Study Reveals How to Nurture Your Fans to Grow Your Brand

Censorship and moderation issues continue to plague social networks. Facebook is facing anti-trust allegations and is lobbying its users to object to Apple’s new privacy changes. Meanwhile, Twitter and Reddit face a new challenger in Parler, which threatens to pull in conservative users and further entrench filter bubbles.

As social networks continue to face scrutiny and transparency issues, marketers need an owned, secure, trustworthy outlet to engage with their fans and consumers. Identified by Forbes and HubSpot as a rising trend, and leveraged by brands like LEGO, that outlet may be branded social communities.

What is a Branded Social Community?

A branded social community is an online community that a brand launches, manages, and moderates in order to engage with their consumers in real time. Brands elicit the opinions of their customers, and ask their members to generate content and ideas for new products or services.

Branded social communities, sometimes referred to as social crowdsourcing communities (SCC), are largely unstudied, despite being used by global brands to engage with millions of individuals. That’s why Dr. Khobaib Zaamout, (at the time a PhD candidate at the University of Calgary), set out to explore the kinds of interactions that take place in these interesting and powerful branded social networks. Dr. Zaamout partnered with Chaordix, the online community platform that powers connections between brands and their customers, to unlock these insights.

Published in late 2020, the study analyzed interactions within a large branded social community in order to identify interaction patterns, their evolution, and the factors that affect them. Dr. Zaamout analyzed data from a private SCC consisting of brand loyalists of a major mobile phone company. The community focused on brand advocacy, brand loyalty, and marketing, and was made up of over 5,000 members. The research analyzed an anonymized log of their 750K interactions over five years beginning in 2012 and running until 2017.

Here are the top three insights marketers can learn from this fascinating study:

1. Shared interests can ensure community stability
   The nature of the relationships between members in a SCC is very different from mainstream social networks. On Facebook or LinkedIn, most members know one another in some capacity. In a branded social community, there is no reliance on bonds outside the community. Instead, relationships between pairs in the community are formed because of shared interests. As a result, the network effects that make or break mainstream social networks do not apply to branded social communities because you do not need to add friends in order to have a good experience. The research showed that this dynamic helps make branded social community membership relatively stable.
2. Community members have two different interaction styles - both are valuable
   The strength of the shared interest among members manifests in the intensity of interactions among them. Members who share more interests tend to interact more frequently than those that have fewer shared interests. This leads to the emergence of two interaction styles among members: frequent and infrequent interactions. Both these styles play important roles in branded social communities, in driving business value for the brand, as well as maintaining the vibrancy and activity within the community.
   
   Frequent interactors tend to produce query responses. That means that if a brand launches an activity or starts a discussion, frequent interactors are going to be the ones contributing ideas and submissions. On the other hand, those categorized as infrequent interactors tend to kick off discussions around the responses. One group contributes ideas, the other provides feedback and spurs conversation.
3. Leverage gamification and ‘follow’ opportunities in tandem to increase participation
   Branded social communities often utilize different levers to incentivize participation. One is gamification, which includes allowing members to earn badges and points for participation. Another is the ability to ‘follow’ or be ‘followed’ by other members. Gamification and follows together play a key role in inspiring quicker participation among community members.

How to apply these insights in your online community:

1. When planning to launch a branded social community, marketers should ensure it is focussed on a topic of interest and has an overarching goal, so that members are inspired to join and interact with new members. Community growth tactics should put less focus on encouraging members to invite their friends and instead encourage members to share the community with the other online topic-focussed groups they are a part of.
2. Marketers should remember that moderation is an important ingredient in a branded social community, and they should steward the 20% of folks who contribute the most. At the same time, infrequent contributors should not be ignored, as they play an important role as the providers of feedback and comments.
3. Finally, branded social community owners should employ gamification and connection functionality in order to nurture speedy participation. Badges or points should be awarded for quick responses and for following other members.

As marketers plan for 2021, they should consider shifting focus and investment from the fraught mainstream social media channels, and instead use the proven power of branded social communities to connect with the people who matter most: their customers.

Written by Chad Neufeld, Marketing Lead at Chaordix.com.