Digital dialogue in online brand communities: Examining the social network outcomes of brands’ dialogue with Facebook users

How information and communication technologies (ICTs) condition people's social relationships that further affect their communication processes has been a significant research agenda. ICTs enable an organization to dialogue and develop relationships with its stakeholders on digital platforms. How organization-stakeholder digital dialogue (OSD) affects the relational network of an organization's online community remains largely understudied. Employing social network perspective, this study tests the multi-dimensions of OSD on social media and examines impacts of the digital OSD on brand-centric networks based on discursive relationships among actors (i.e., organization-stakeholder and stakeholder-stakeholder relationships). By analyzing eight brands’ Facebook data using content analysis (N = 8838) and social network analysis (N_edge = 74,969), we found that two OSD dimensions (i.e., conversational handling and participation simulation) enhance the network size and interactivity of the brands’ Facebook communities as well as the brands’ structural influence (i.e., in-degree centrality, efficiency, and eigenvector centrality) in the network. The study has theoretical and practical implications for researchers and practitioners who are interested in ICT-enhanced dialogue, organization-stakeholder networks, and online brand communities on social media.