| Author: | Liu, Lu Lucy |
| Title: | An examination of social media marketing in China : how did top 133 hotel brands perform on top five domestic social media sites? |
| Advisors: | Denizci Guillet, Basak (SHTM) |
| Degree: | M.Sc. |
| Year: | 2014 |
| Subject: | Internet marketing Online social networks -- Economic aspects. Hotels -- China. Hotel management -- China. Branding (Marketing) Hong Kong Polytechnic University -- Dissertations |
| Department: | School of Hotel and Tourism Management |
| Pages: | viii, 118 leaves : illustrations ; 30 cm |
| Language: | English |
| Abstract: | The importance of social media marketing in hospitality has appealed to considerable attention from both scholars and industry practitioners. However, the existing hospitality literature is lagging, limited number of articles examines the performance of hotels in their utilization of social media marketing, and it is even a whitespace in China. To close the gap, this paper aims at developing a set of evaluation criteria based on the 6Is social media monitoring framework, which including: 1) Involvement, 2) Interaction, 3) Intimacy, 4) Influence, 5) Insight and 6) Impact, to explore the social media marketing performance by top 133 hotels brands in China, with the aim for conducting an extensively investigation of how did these hotel brands perform on the top five domestic social media sites: Qzone, Sina Weibo, Tencent Weibo, Qzone and Youku. The findings indicated that Sina Weibo and Wechat are the platforms that hotel brands present most actively and consistently marketing efforts. For the hotels' social media marketing performance, even though the majority of hotel brands evaluated have begun to have the awareness explore its potential to develop social media marketing, much more can be done. Major problems regarding hotels handle social media marketing are identified which including (1) Challenging in targeting valid social media account, (2) Gap between social media "marketing" and "sales", (3) Economy brands perform better in social media adoption, (4) Selectively reply comments, deliberately escape for guests complaints, (5) Lack understanding of customers, (6) Lack of affiliation between brands, property and corporate, (7) Lack of point of attraction, (8) Lack supervision of postings. A comparison of social media marketing performance between China and Hong Kong was also presented in order to get a more comprehensive understanding of hotels social media marketing performance. Lastly, implications behind these problems were developed, and eight practical recommendations for future improvements are made accordingly. |
| Rights: | All rights reserved |
| Access: | restricted access |
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| File | Description | Size | Format | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| b28195504.pdf | For All Users (off-campus access for PolyU Staff & Students only) | 5.11 MB | Adobe PDF | View/Open |
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