Analyzing interactions and identifying social roles in a brand community on social networks

This research focuses on the understanding of brand communities created by consumers on social networks, by identifying the social roles of its members. We analyze the different users' roles through three levels of analysis: activity, content shared, structural position in the network. Our data come from a specific brand community on Facebook. The considered brand is worldwide famous and belongs to the Small Household Equipment market. We coded more than one thousand posts to provide a content analysis. We first apply two types of analysis: quantitative and qualitative. We conceptualize the role as observable behaviors, created by the individual position in the network and his interactions with the other members. Analysis led to the detection of nine different roles, based on three criteria: the subject of interest (product/practice); the individual objective (learning/knowledge sharing); the individual orientation (factual/relational). In a second step and in order to improve the understanding of the social roles in the community, we run a structural approach by qualifying each member of the community by network structure variables. We show that network structure variables provide valuable insights for better understanding the interactions between members and their roles. We show that it is valuable for managers to characterize social networks users by their social roles by analyzing content and structural position. This work opens new topics for future research on monitoring interactions, social roles and users' actions on social networks and their impact on markets and marketing strategies.