Reasons of using social media in hotel enterprises: A study at five-star hotels in Istanbul

The rapid developments in technology increases the facilities of communication and data sharing. The wide use of social sharing channels like twitter and facebook offers people and companies a lot of facilities. The information about meaning of social media concept and its qualities will be given in this study. The aim of this research is to make a general evaluation about the using social media of five starred hotels in İstanbul. How the hotel managers evaluate social media channels from their own perspectives and their utilization level of using them are being searched. The main questions of this research consist of hotel managers'choices of social media, why they prefer them, how they use them and what their opinion and manner about them. This study will be a contribution to the related literature as well as being one of guide studies to the hotel managers in Turkey in defining utilization level of using social media channels. There will be a cathegoric evaluation according to the datas taken. Sentences, words and paragraphs will be used as analysis units; at the end coding and deep conception study will be done so that content analysis also be done. At the end of the research it is predicted that hotels are using facebook and twitter most as social media channels and they are used for actual data sharing, hotel service and product publicity, getting feedback and evaluating new products.