Abstract
Social media communication has become a fundamental tool for hospitality companies, especially for marketing and customer engagement purposes. Facebook is the social network most used by hotels, both to interact and to establish relationships with their customers, and to provide them with relevant content and information, which may contribute to a positive travel experience and overall satisfaction. In general, content hotels post on Facebook either emphasizes hotels’ services (hotel-level or internal information) or aspects related to where the hotels are located (destination-level or external information) while conveying emotional attributes. Thus, this study aims to unveil the content strategy of these two types of content levels for hotels in the two most-visited cities in Spain, as well as to explore the emotional aspect of hotel Facebook posts. To do so, 4725 Facebook messages posted by 189 hotels in Barcelona and 1175 posted by 47 hotels in Madrid were analyzed using compositional data analysis, which accounts for the relative importance (shares) of different types of contents. Results show that hotels in Barcelona post more content related to hotel services and hotels in Madrid post more content related to the destination.
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Acknowledgements
Authors are pleased to acknowledge the support of the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness (Grant IDs ECO2017-88984-R and TIN2015-71799-C2-2-P), the support of the Catalan Government for the accreditation as Consolidated Research Group TURESCO (2017 SG4 49) and the University of Lleida Grant 2017-TR265. Finally, the authors wish to thank Marc Alimbau, Anna Tkach and Alice Florina Ghencea from the University of Lleida, for their help with data collection. This research article has received a grant for its linguistic revision from the Language Institute of the University of Lleida (2019 call).
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Ferrer-Rosell, B., Martin-Fuentes, E. & Marine-Roig, E. Diverse and emotional: Facebook content strategies by Spanish hotels. Inf Technol Tourism 22, 53–74 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40558-019-00164-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40558-019-00164-z