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Introduction
Social media has become imperative for branding because of the brand’s ability to connect with consumers in a more interactive and individualised manner. Brands thus have a growing interest in social media-based brand communities to cultivate relationships with consumers through community building activities. Brand researchers concur that community building in social media leads to more brand loyalty and trust, although there are still different perspectives on how to achieve it (Laroche, Habibi & Richard 2013). Consequently, there are ample studies on diverse brand community topics through lenses such as virtual brand communities (Potgieter & Naidoo 2017; Rosenthal & Brito 2017), social media marketing (Cawsey & Rowley 2016) and consumers’ reasons for joining brand communities in social media (Chi 2011).
Fewer studies focus on social media content communities whose main purpose is to share content in various formats among users (Kaplan & Haenlein 2010). Recently, social media content communities have become more prominent because of brands that use content marketing as a branding technique. Content marketing is a contemporary marketing paradigm with many long term benefits such as building brand loyalty by engaging with the target audience with valuable content without employing promotional techniques (Pulizzi 2012b). However, more clarity is needed about the role of content marketing in social media content communities, especially because content marketing is often confused with social media marketing (Murdock 2012). Although social media marketing is widely adopted on social media platforms, it is more promotional and interfering than content marketing. While there are similarities between content and social media marketing, they have different processes, focal points and goals. Weinberg (2009) defines social media marketing as:
the process that empowers individuals to promote their websites, products, or services through online social channels and tap into a much larger community that may not have been available via traditional channels. (p. 3)
Hillebrand (2014:9) argues that content marketing is used as an alternative to ‘connecting with the users and building relationships with customers instead of simply informing about new products and promotions’. As early as 2008, Agichtein et al. (2008:183) argued that numerous social media activities revolve around content and that online communities have become one of the many emanations of social media. Much of the literature reveals that this phenomenon has since...