Abstract:
Boutique hotels are adopting social media to build relationships, spread word of mouth, initiate quality engagement that will ultimately turn into bookings, and to build a brand over their competition. Such engagement on social media is considered to be attractive as they enable targeted marketing, direct customer engagement, multiple forms of engagement, low cost, and facilitates self-promotion. However, the effectiveness of social media-based market initiatives is not clear as they primarily rely on soft metrics such as the number of likes, sharing, and comments than the actual customer conversions. Moreover, it is unclear what factors to be considered when conducting social media marketing by business owners themselves. We address these problems through a case study of ten boutique hotels in Sri Lanka with strong social media presence. The research was conducted as qualitative analysis based on the Straussian grounded theory. This version of grounded theory allows a literature review for theoretical sampling, concept development, and defining properties and dimensions. Data were gathered through a set of face-to-face and telephone interviews. We found nine factors that mainly contribute to successful social media presence. Those factors include the target audience, platform for communication, mode of communication, maintaining engagement, audience reach, timing, resources, company policies and platform rules and regulations.
