Social media content strategy in hospitality: the impact of experiential posts and response congruence on engagement, hotel image, and booking intention

ABSTRACT

This study aims to address the role of content type in social media posts and the influence of management response congruence on improving user engagement, booking intention and hotel brand image. An online between-subjects factorial experimental design with 559 subjects from a consumer panel was performed to test the proposed model. The empirical evidence suggests that congruency should be considered a key moderating variable when assessing the impact of content and messages on social media since it might significantly change how content affects online users’ decision-making process. If hotel management is thus unable to properly manage its responses to users’ comments in a congruent way, posts related to the ambience dimension become more important. Furthermore, congruence between a published post and the subsequent management response to user comments effectively leads to higher engagement, functional brand image, hedonic brand image and booking intention than incongruent or no management response.本研究旨在探讨社交媒体帖子内容类型的作用,以及管理层回应一致性对提高用户参与度、预订意向和酒店品牌形象的影响。研究采用在线主体间因子实验设计,从消费者小组中挑选了 559 名受试者,对所提出的模型进行了检验。实证结果表明,在评估社交媒体上内容和信息的影响时,一致性应被视为一个关键的调节变量,因为它可能会显著改变内容对在线用户决策过程的影响。如果酒店管理层无法以一致的方式妥善管理其对用户评论的回应,那么与氛围维度相关的帖子就会变得更加重要。此外,与不一致或无管理回应相比,发布的帖子与随后管理层对用户评论的回应之间的一致性能有效提高参与度、功能性品牌形象、享乐性品牌形象和预订意向。

KEYWORDS:

• Management response
• content type
• social media
• hotel
• congruence
• hotel experience

Acknowledgments

The authors acknowledge Dr. Casaló, University of Zaragoza, for his valuable feedback on the experimental design. They also give thanks to Dra. Díaz-Martín, Autonomous University of Madrid, for her continuous support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, [M.V], upon reasonable request.

Additional information

Funding

This study was conducted under the framework of the UAM Research Group TECHNOCONS ‘Consumer Behavior and Technology’. The research was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, grant number PID2020-113561RB-I00 and by the Professorship Excellence Program, multiyear agreement signed by the Government of Madrid and the Autonomous University of Madrid (Line #3).