Popularity of Facebook hotel brand-page posts among consumers: a study of top ten international and domestic hospitality brands in India

Marketers have recognised the unprecedented popularity of social networking sites and are prompting to invest in their social media presence to disseminate information and marketing messages. In specific, hospitality brands are establishing Facebook pages with the relevant information that contain anecdotes, photos, videos or other multimedia content. Such innovative communication mediums promote interaction among members of the brand page and facilitate their direct feedback through online engagement metrics. The objective of this paper is to analyse the content of the posts published on the official Facebook brand pages of the top ten international and domestic hotels operating in India and investigate their impact on the online engagement of users. The authors have performed manual coding for 950 posts by following a systematic coding strategy and thereafter, have applied the multivariate analysis. The findings contribute to the theory of information dissemination through social media platform and serve as a guide to hotels brand marketers in identifying posts characteristics that would be able to generate positive online responses.