Strategic Review of virtual social media as a medium role in creating brand equity

The purpose of this paper is to examine the strategic role of virtual social networks is on brand equity, to determine the “Honeycomb Model” raised by Smith. Which has seven components: identity, presence, sharing, standing, group, relationships and dialogue and to review brand equity model used Aker brand equity. This research led to a new structured model was based on the above theories that increased our understanding of the relationship between the use of social media and brand equity. Data were collected in three ways: structured interviews, direct observation of several social media and questionnaire. A combination of research methods (qualitative / quantitative) was selected to carry out the research. The population of this research are consumers of Nike brand in Tehran and Cluster sampling is available and with a few random selection of some delegates from total delegates of this brand and distribute a questionnaire with 33 questions was conducted among 384 of our customers. For data analysis and hypothesis testing research model, the SPSS, LISREL and PLS software were used by structural equation modeling (SEM) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA).
The results show the influence of variables "identity", "share", "Fame", "relationships", "dialogue" and "Group" on brand equity. It should be noted that the variable "presence" had no significant effect on brand equity.