Hotel Businesses Use of Social Media as a Public Relations Instrument: Twitter Sample

Abstract

Developments in the information and communication technologies have begun to offer new possibilities for public relations activities of hotel businesses. With the help of Twitter, which is included in the social media tools, the hotel businesses have got the opportunity to inform the target audience. In addition, consumers have had the opportunity to transmit requests, expectations and suggestions to the business. This study, which is aimed at evaluating the use of social media by hotel companies, examined the shares between 01 December 2016 and 01 March 2017 via Twitter through the institutional accounts of three of the ten largest capacity hotels, according to HotelNewsNow (2015) data, by content analysis. It is often the case that hotel businesses choose the tweet from the sharing types, that they communicate one-way, and that the content of the tweets is heavily promotional. As a result of categorizing the tweets that hotel groups sent from their corporate twitter accounts, eleven themes were determined. The result that the most used themes consisted of presentation, corporate news, thanks, information were reached.