Consumer engagement in social media platforms: A study for hospitality industry

Social media plays a critical role in sales, marketing and customer relations. Consequently, effective utilization of social media as a communication tool can serve as a major competitive advantage. For any company understanding the reasons behind why consumers choose to interact with their brand through social media portals is a prerequisite to successfully manage these channels. With the overarching goal to provide clear guidance on effective employment of social media portals this study focuses on identification of primary drives behind consumer engagement with brands in social media platforms. The work employs sequential pattern based discovery method—a mixed method approach—and consists of two parts. The first part presents an extensive literature research focusing on the framework that captures the role of social media in consumer/company relationship. In the second part we present a two-tier analysis. In the quantitative section of the work we employed reviews posted on the Facebook page of a 5-star hotel located in Alanya. Encoding the raw data gave rise to ten distinct themes: satisfaction, advocacy, identity, appreciation, utility, association, request-proposal, information, experience and recommendation. In the qualitative second tier of the analysis we generalized out results by building a structure informed by the themes discovered in the former qualitative study. In this step we employed convenience sampling method. A questionnaire is conducted targeting a population of holiday goers who choose to interact with hotels through social media outlets. Analyzing responses from participants we discovered seven dimensions: utility and experience; identity; appreciation; information; advocacy; recommendation; and satisfaction. The appreciation dimension is a new discovery in this area and major contribution of this study to the literature.