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.
