Background: Content marketing has become a leading marketing technique in digital marketing communication and uses the point of view of consumers to build relationships by creating and sharing engaging content in social media that enhance their daily lives. Existing research on social media communities has focused mainly on social media marketing and virtual brand community perspectives while content marketing’s valuable and unobtrusive role in social media content communities has largely been overlooked.Objective: The purpose of this article was to investigate content marketing’s role in social media content communities to engage with the target audience in an innate manner.Method: This study made use of a directed, inductive content analysis of 51 practitioner documents relating to business-to-consumer content marketing practices to add another perspective to existing research on communities in social media. The content analysis was facilitated by using QDA Miner, a widely adopted and reliable qualitative data analysis software programme.Results: Three categories emerged from the data namely building content communities, platform-specific content and understanding channels. These categories provide sufficient evidence of how brands make use of social media content communities to connect with the target audience in an unobtrusive manner, in addition to being present in virtual brand communities.Conclusion: The findings make several contributions to the existing literature. Firstly, it provides a clearer distinction between brand and social media content communities. Secondly, it extends conceptions about social media communities to include content communities and, thirdly, it provides sufficient evidence of how content marketing could benefit a brand by naturally becoming part of social media conversations.

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INTRODUCTIONI think the biggest change, and the one we're already starting to see take shape, is that globally the majority of internet usage will be done via a mobile device and for most people the mobile web will be their primary -if not their only -way of experiencing the internet (Rojas, in Adler 2014).This prediction by Peter Rojas, formerly associated with the technology blog Gizmodo and currently with Engadget, became a reality when Google announced in 2015 that more than half of all searches are now done on mobile devices. This development has huge implications for branding in that brand messages might soon be seen mainly by users on a company's mobile website or device (Sterling 2015).

This article pertains to prosumer engagement, an important topic in academic research on media consumption and branding. Increasingly, there have been calls in the branding literature for a more audience-centred approach to making a deeper emotional connection with consumers in an age when interactive media have become imperative for communication. Prosumers, who both consume and produce media, have a different relationship with a brand to traditional consumers, as they are more actively involved in the brand’s story. The participatory nature of transmedia branding strengthens prosumer engagement through brand stories that enable an active contribution in an immersive story world. This article considers the rise in the use of transmedia story-making within the contemporary branding environment by proposing a framework for prosumer engagement in transmedia branding. Specifically, it examines how a leading transmedia brand, LEGO, has sought to engage prosumers in an active community using elements of this framework through an integrative, immersive and spreadable story.