How Hotel Companies Can Foster Customer Sociability Behaviour on Facebook?

Abstract

Social network sites (hereinafter, SNSs) have become extremely popular, playing an important role in consumers’ every day lives. Empowered by SNSs, the customer becomes more active and spends more time with their family, friends or companies online. Therefore, companies seek to encourage online conversations for several beneficial reasons such as maintaining relationships with their customers and achieving customer loyalty. There are no widely accepted characteristics of company messages that foster customer sociability behaviour regarding likes, comments, shares and emotion expressions on Facebook in literature. The purpose of this paper is to explore the characteristics of company messages that facilitate customer sociability behaviour on Facebook. The current study integrates content analysis and text analysis with the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count Software (LIWC). The data were obtained from two five-star hotel brands on Facebook from 18th October 2016 to 18th October 2017. A total of 306 messages were collected. The results indicated that social messages generated more consumer likes, comments and emotional expressions on Facebook. The number of likes, comments and emotion expressions can be facilitated by images with humans. Messages accompanied with social words exhibit customer comments and emotion expressions.

Enhancing social media engagement by the hospitality industry: The power of customer experience dimensions

“…Our results confirm that the content of the message has an effect on engagement (Vaiciukynaite and Gatautis, 2018). However, the results also reveal that the responses of potential visitors to a hotel might differ depending on the way in which publications related to the dimensions of customer experience are presented, thereby facilitating the establishment of an attachment to the hotel brand to a greater or lesser degree.…”

“…Each of these actions implies more active participation of users and, therefore, a higher level of involvement on their part. “Likes” allow users to express their positive feelings towards the content shared by the brand (Vaiciukynaite and Gatautis, 2018). This behaviour can be interpreted as an “affective” response but represents the least degree of commitment and cognitive effort since a simple click is sufficient (Kim and Yang, 2017).…”

The influential role of hotel-generated content on social media

“…In general, much of the academic literature has focused on analyzing the strategy of messages in social networks in terms of the type of content and the format and its impact on metrics such as interaction or engagement (Luarn et al , 2015; Tafesse and Wien, 2018; Vaičiukynaitė and Gatautis, 2018; Vaiciukynaite et al , 2017). Research on the impact of HGC on social media is much more limited.…”

Engaging Customers on Facebook Coffee Shops' Brand-Fan Pages

“…In the Facebook environment, companies develop relationships with customers through messages accompanied with text, photos, or videos and other material (company's page content) (Vaičiukynaitė et al, 2018). CE is manifested as liking, commenting, and sharing the company's page content (Gruss et al, 2020) and refers to a type of activity beyond purchasing (B.…”

“…Posts should include videos and images because they have the highest positive impact on engagement (Bitiktas et al, 2020;Siyam et al, 2020). Furthermore, Vaičiukynaitė & Gatautis (2018) add that marketers should use more social messages and images with humans to increase the number of likes, comments, and emotional expressions and foster customer engagement (CE) on Facebook. Gruss et al (2020) also dealt with the posts' content using restaurants on Facebook.…”