Analysis of Instagram posts: A study on boutique hotels

Social media provides businesses with advantages in many ways, these advantages can be listed as reaching their potential customers, maintaining communication with their customers, and mediating themselves to introduce themselves to a large audience. The tourism industry and hotel businesses, due to the services they provide, need to establish continuous communication with their current and potential customers and introduce themselves to these people. Businesses who use social media platforms for this purpose, in order to have benefits of it need to develop strategies in this direction by using social media in the most effective way. The aim of this study is to analyze the effect of the visuals used for social media posts of boutique hotels, which have come to the fore in recent years thanks to their various features among hotel types, on interaction. Used data have been obtained from the shares and images used in 1231 posts shared in a one-year period between March 2021 and February 2022. The data have been collected manually from the Insights Panel of the Instagram application. First of all, content analysis was carried out and the photos used in the shares were coded and classified into content types, then descriptive statistics and the frequencies of the variables were presented. According to the results of the carried analysis, it has been seen that influence from content types has the highest interaction average in terms of likes, sharing and recording. The highest interpretation was achieved via humanization. When the total number of interactions is evaluated, each post provided an average of 159,20 interactions, while the influence was the type of content that provided the most interaction with an average of 245,28. It also had the highest average in terms of impressions, accounts reached and profile activities. The present study reveals the effects of pictures used for shares on accounts engagement of boutique hotels and provides advice on its usage in a most effective manner. Obtained data is valuable for social media managers, content editors, and people responsible for marketing, branding, and promotion of hotels to perform successful social media management, perform effective campaign management, increase brand investment returns, and stand out against their competitors. Used data have been obtained from the shares and images used in 1231 posts shared in a one-year period between March 2021 and February 2022. The data have been collected manually from the Statistics Panel of the Instagram application. First of all, content analysis was carried out and the photos used in the shares were coded and classified into content types, then descriptive statistics and the frequencies of the variables were presented. According to the results of the carried analysis, it has been seen that influence from content types has the highest interaction average in terms of likes, sharing and recording. The highest interpretation was achieved via humanization. When the total number of interactions is evaluated, each post provided an average of 159,20 interactions, while the influence was the type of content that provided the most interaction with an average of 245,28. It also had the highest average in terms of impressions, accounts reached and profile activities. The present study reveals the effects of pictures used for shares on accounts engagement of boutique hotels and provides advice on its usage in a most effective manner. Obtained data is valuable for social media managers, content editors, and people responsible for marketing, branding, and promotion of hotels to perform successful social media management, perform effective campaign management, increase brand investment returns, and stand out against their competitors.