Title: Challenges of social media marketing - an explorative international study of hotels

Authors: Karin Högberg

Addresses: School of Business, Economics and IT, University West, Trollhättan, Sweden

Abstract: With the worldwide increased usage of social media, organisations are experiencing great pressure to implement social media into their existing marketing strategies. Due to this development, social media has rapidly become an important marketing tool. The study focuses on social media marketing implementation, with the aim to develop an increased understanding of the challenges concerning how hotels adapt social media into their marketing activities by investigating social media marketing usage in hotels. The result suggests that most hotels are reactive in their social media usage and do not actively seek interaction, and that individual knowledge needs to be spread throughout organisations to a greater extent in order to achieve interaction with customers in social media channels.

Keywords: social media marketing; SMM; knowledge capture; knowledge sharing; technology; hotels; customer engagement; relationship marketing; leisure industry.

DOI: 10.1504/IJTMKT.2017.083372

International Journal of Technology Marketing, 2017 Vol.12 No.2, pp.127 - 141

Received: 06 Aug 2016
Accepted: 21 Aug 2016
Published online: 24 Mar 2017 *

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