Momoko, F., Harrigan, P., and Soutar, G. N. (2018). Capturing and Co-creating Student Experiences in Social Media: A Social Identity Theory Perspective. Ellen Thornton

From Digital Culture & Society

Momoko, F., Harrigan, P., & Soutar, G. N. (2018). CAPTURING AND CO-CREATING STUDENT EXPERIENCES IN SOCIAL MEDIA: A SOCIAL IDENTITY THEORY PERSPECTIVE. Journal Of Marketing Theory & Practice, 26(1/2), 55-71. doi:10.1080/10696679.2017.1389245 Retrieved from https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10696679.2017.1389245?scroll=top&needAccess=true

Ellen Thornton

Social media has become a place for users to create online communities with people who share common interests with them, and connect with people from all across the world. These groups and connections also help to shape users’ online identities, which can either reflect their offline presence, or can be drastically different. Because of this, it is important for brands, companies, and institutions to engage with their followers in a way that adds to their online identity, and creates a relationship between them.

The article by Momoko, Harrigan, and Soutar (2018) discusses how marketers can create and facilitate an online community for their followers in order for them to have a positive experience. Their study focused on the Facebook and Instagram pages of the University of Western Australia. The authors analyzed posts from the institution, as well as the number of likes and comments from their followers in order to understand the type of engagement there is on the pages. This type of community is called a social media brand community (also referred to as an SMBC). To analyze the results, the authors applied social identity theory as the context in order to specifically look at how engagement with a brand on social media affects the online presence of their followers. The results of the study concluded that a variety of different strategies, such as identity narratives encourage followers to engage with the brand through social media and create a close-knit community with both the university and the other followers.

The first strength of the article is that the authors introduce social identity theory in order to interpret their results. The authors go into great detail about the different types of social identity, such as affective, evaluative, and cognitive social identities, and defines each element. In addition, the article explains why each element of social identity theory is essential to creating a bond with followers and a positive online community around a brand or company. Another strength the article outlines is that it analyzes two different social media platforms for the university. The article discusses the differences in content and follower engagement on each page. Through reviewing multiple social media platforms, it gives a more holistic result and understanding of the data for the authors and readers. In addition, looking at two different social media websites shows how different features that are offered by each platform affect the university’s content and how the followers engage with the pages. Finally, the article outlines a variety of different methods that companies and institutions can achieve engagement with their followers. This is important for readers to know as there are many different variables that need to be considered when posting on social media for a brand or institution. Factors such as the type of media used in the post and the type of platform will result in different levels of interaction and reactions from followers, which can lead in different companies implementing different strategies and still achieve the same results.

While this article has many strengths and goes into great detail explaining their theory and results, there are some limitations that pertain to the method of data collection. To begin, the authors of the article chose to focus on the social media pages of a university. While using the school as the “brand”, the goal of the page is to create a community with people who currently attend the university, are recent graduates, or are incoming students. This helps to solidify an online community with the audience, however it does not have the goal of attracting new followers and growing their community through advertising. For future research, it may be interesting to analyze a brand to see how they market themselves in order to gain new followers, while at the same time interacting with their current following. The types of posts made by the university was also filtered for the study to exclude co-authored content by students, such as reposting their pictures on their Instagram page. For the study, it was important to solely analyze posts made fully by the university, but in the future research can include student submitted content in order to see if there is a difference in engagement and interaction between the two different kinds of content. The final limitation found in this study is that the authors used a pure observational approach when collecting data. This means that the article focuses only on information found in the Facebook and Instagram posts, and does not include any opinions from the university’s followers. Extra information found in focus groups, questionnaires, or interviews would help to confirm the results that were found in the observational data.

In conclusion, the article addresses not only the impact of strong engagement between an institution or company on social media, but also describes different strategies of how to achieve high engagement with their followers. Using the social identity theory, the authors found that users follow these social media accounts in order to shape their online presence, and feel like they belong to a community of people with similar interests. Brands that interact with their followers can then create strong relationships with them, which also makes their followers feel included and that they are being heard, which in turn continues the cycle of consumer-brand interaction.