Netflix relationship marketing on Twitter. Creating brand community through online communication

Netflix is one of the most popular subscription video on-demand platforms (SVOD) worldwide, operating in 190 counties and with active social media presence. Brand’s communication on social media has been praised by marketing publications and branded as ‘successful’ in engaging followers, attributing it to the use of relationship marketing to engage online brand community existing on Twitter. However, limited scientific research has been conducted to create comprehensive understanding of Netflix’s social media strategy, especially on Twitter. Consequently, this research aims to reduce the existing knowledge gap, and determine the characteristics of messages comprising relationship marketing strategy of Netflix on Twitter, ultimately seeking to answer ‘How does Netflix use Twitter communication to implement relationship marketing towards its online brand community?’. Research on online brand communities in different cultural settings remains limited, and therefore the study included the cross-cultural comparison between communication of Netflix US and Netflix India, to explore whether Netflix adapts its relationship marketing strategy to different cultural contexts. To answer the study’s research question and sub-research question, qualitative content analysis of a total of 1,145 tweets posted by Netflix and by its online brand community was conducted, analyzing both textual and visual data in the messages. Through directed content analysis, combining the deductive and inductive category creation, three themes were distinguished. It was observed that Netflix focused on three thematic areas in its Twitter communication to implement relationship marketing towards its online brand community: ‘All about Netflix’, ‘Community relations’, and ‘The world around us’. Therefore, the research concluded that the relationship marketing of Netflix on Twitter exhibits a unified approach across different accounts, which can be represented as a three-level model with three focus areas. These are: internal level focused on promoting the brand and its content, middle level focused on social interactions with the brand community, and external level focused on discussing topics prominent in society. Research also detected that Netflix employs localization strategy in referencing topics relevant for specific cultural contexts of the US and India in promoting the content and initiating conversations. Overall, this research contributes to expanding the knowledge on Twitter strategy of a prominent SVOD platform in crosscultural context and details its elements, and offers an insight into the ‘success’ strategy that can serve as a useful audience engagement model for other media organizations.