بازاریابی رسانه اجتماعی هتل: مطالعه استراتژی پیام و اثر بخشی آن Hotel social media marketing: a study on message strategy and its effectiveness

1. Introduction “Marketing is no longer about the stuff that you make, but about the stories you tell.” – Seth Godin. As the famous marketing guru lays it out, marketing message matters, especially when employing social media as a marketing tool. The use of social media as part of the travel information search activity is becoming the norm. In business perspective, social media are perceived as effective tools and fruitful platforms for deepening customer engagement and enhancing customer-business interactions (Sigala, 2012). It comes as no surprise that the lodging industry is paying attention to the use of social media when it comes to marketing and engagement of guests. A survey showed that more than 90% of hospitality businesses were using social media for business purpose (First Merchant Services and Coyle Hospitality Group, 2012). It was also reported that social media had become a top priority for hoteliers and nearly 2/3 of all hotels used some form of social media to attract customers (TripAdvisor, 2012). More and more hotels are establishing or enhancing their presence on social media platforms (Chan and Guillet, 2011). Given this growing trend, it behooves hoteliers to ensure that the message presented on social media outlets is indeed effective and the resources allocated to such efforts are justified. However, in a special industry report (Green and Lomanno, 2012), hoteliers are urged to be watchful when using emerging social media channels. And hoteliers are looking for possible means to measure marketing effectiveness when using social media as part of their marketing arsenal. A review of related research literature does not offer a consensus on how to best achieve marketing effectiveness when using social media as a hotel marketing tool. On social media platforms, messages posted by hotels are the major medium of advertising (“story telling”). Thus, to understand the marketing effectiveness of social media, it is very important to explore the messages as hotel advertisements. The literature again showed a lack of research focusing on studying social media messages. Having recognized this gap, this study applied advertising message strategy as theoretical framework to develop a typology of social media message strategies and examined the effectiveness of different message strategies. Specifically, the study intended to answer the following two research questions: (1) what types of message strategies are used currently by U.S. hotels on social media, and (2) which type of message strategy is the most effective in terms of popularity measures. By answering these two research questions, this study sought to offer useful suggestions on hotels’ future social media message strategy decisions.