(TLH312)-Role of Mobile Technology and Social Media Marketing in Tourism & Hospitality: Hilton Hotel Case Study

E-TOURISM 1
ASSIGNMENT COVER SHEET
UNIVERSITY OF SUNDERLAND
Student ID: 179209789/1
Student Name: Vanessa Tri Septya
Module Code: TLH312
Module Name / Title: E-Tourism
Centre / College: Management Development of Singapore (MDIS)
Hand in Date: 25-Mar-2019Due Date: 25-Mar-2019
Assignment Title:
Critically evaluate the role of Mobile Technology and Social Media Marketing for a
business within the Tourism and Hospitality Industries to build a competitive
advantage. Use one case study to demonstrate your arguments.
Students Signature: (you must sign this declaring that it is all your own work and all
sources of information have been
Vanessa Tri Septya

E-TOURISM 2
UNIVERSITYOF SUNDERLAND
BACHELOR OF SCIENCE (HONS) INTERNATIONAL TRAVEL,
TOURISM AND HOSPITALITY MANAGEMENT
TLH 312
E-TOURISM
Critically evaluate the role of Mobile Technology and Social Media
Marketing for a business within the Tourism and Hospitality
Industries to build a competitive advantage. Use one case study to
demonstrate your arguments.
Case Study: Hilton Hotel
Web presence: www.hiltonhotel.com
Name: Vanessa Tri Septya
Batch:: BTHD5 1812A
Date of Submission: 25-Mar-2019

E-TOURISM 3
Executive summary
With a change in technology and social trends globally, the use of digital marketing has been
increased in all the industries. The modern marketing technique includes social media marketing,
which has changed the trends in the market. In the report, the focus will be over hospitality
management.
The types of built-in and stand-alone social media services that are available in the current
environment. Some of the major features of social media include the user-generated content are
used or shared, which include comments, text posts, digital photos, audios, videos, and
information through online interactions are the major aspects or part of social media. Facebook
Inc. is a social networking service company based in California, founded by Mark Zuckerberg.
This is considered to be one of the four largest technology company with Apple, Google, and
Amazon. Among the top fifteen popular social media platform, Facebook is the leading platform,
which reflects a better platform for the companies to go for marketing. Twitter is an American
social networking service, where the users can interact and post with messages which are called
tweets. The users registered with the company are allowed to post tweets, like them, and retweet.
Considering the social media study, one of its case study “Social media analytics: Extracting and
visualizing Hilton hotel ratings and reviews from Trip Advisor. The case study included
analyzing online hotel review while providing decision making data and marketing insights for
the company in order to enhance the hotel business and improve service quality. Hilton brands
are one of the popular global hospitality company, on which various case studies exist.
The Facebook strategy of Hilton includes having an attractive page, where the section for review,
photos, videos, and events are specified separately. From the posts by the company, it can be
observed that the company focuses on the videos while attracting the customers on Facebook.
The Twitter home page of the company tends to be attractive indicating the brand positioning on
the leisure side, with hashtag strategy to be right here, indicating the world is right here.
It has been observed, that the company usually include pictures and videos as the tweets, and
many customers have retweet with pictures of the hotel they visited and the rooms, and some of
the popular aspect about the company and experience with Hilton.

E-TOURISM 4
Contents
..................................................................................................................................................1
Executive summary.........................................................................................................................3
1. Introduction..................................................................................................................................5
1.1 Background.......................................................................................................................5
1.2 Objectives..........................................................................................................................5
1.3 Significance.......................................................................................................................5
2. Literature Review........................................................................................................................6
2.1 What is Social Media?......................................................................................................6
2.2 Types of Social Media......................................................................................................8
2.2.1 Facebook...................................................................................................................8
2.2.2 Twitter.....................................................................................................................10
2.3 Strategies of social media....................................................................................................11
3. Methodology..........................................................................................................................11
4. Case Study..............................................................................................................................12
5. Discussion..............................................................................................................................13
Statistical analysis......................................................................................................................16
6. Recommendation....................................................................................................................17
7. Conclusion..............................................................................................................................18
8. References..............................................................................................................................20
9. Appendix................................................................................................................................25
Appendix 1.................................................................................................................................25
Appendix 2.................................................................................................................................25
Appendix 3.................................................................................................................................26
Appendix 4.................................................................................................................................26
Appendix 5.................................................................................................................................27

E-TOURISM 5
1. Introduction
1.1 Background
With a change in technology and social trends globally, the use of digital marketing has been
increased in all the industries. In the report, the focus would be over hospitality management.
The modern marketing technique include social media marketing, which has changed the trends
in the market (Pappas, 2016). This may include various ways like trading online through retailing
e-commerce websites, e-mail marketing for a more personalized form of marketing, other social
media platforms include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and snap chat. This platform, are placed
through an organization can reach to a large number of customers at the same time. Moreover,
mobile technology has also emerged to a greater extent to be used by companies for marketing
purposes in order to gain a competitive advantage. The use of these technologies had turned out
to be very useful, which will critically be analyzed through this report (Adam & Kotler, 2014).
1.2 Objectives
The major objective of the study includes:
1.2.1 Understanding the concept of social media marketing, and its applicability to the
hospitality industry (Doole & Lowe, 2008)
1.2.2 Understanding the relevance of social media in marketing activities in today’s scenario
1.2.3 Identifying ways to gain competitive advantage through the use of two major social
media platform, that is Facebook and Twitter (Ding, 2018)
1.3 Significance
The major significance of the study is analyzing the ability of the organizations to gain
competitive advantage through mobile technology and social media platforms. Moreover, would
help the organization to reach out to maximum customers, not limited to area or geography, it
can be applied globally. This study is also relevant to get the ways to increase the sales of the
organization and increase in the number of customers (business.qld.gov, 2018).

E-TOURISM 6
2. Literature Review
2.1 What is Social Media?
Figure: (Source: (dreamgrow, 2019)
Social media are interactive technologies which are the mode of creating and sharing the ideas,
information, career interest and various types of expression through networks and virtual
communities (Chung, 2015). The types of built-in and stand-alone social media services that are
available in the current environment. some of the major features of social media include the user-
generated content are used or shared, which include comments, text posts, digital photos, audios,
videos, and information through online interactions are the major aspects or part of social media.
This has introduced a new trend to interact in groups and way to communicate with a large
number of individuals (Burdo, 2018). The access of social media services are done through web-
based technologies on laptops, desktops, or download services, which offered tits functionality to
integrate to mobile technologies, that is using social media over mobile devices like tablets and
smartphones. Social media has turned out to be a positive change in the society, however, the
negative aspects were also observed out of these, for instance, increase in cybercrime
(Armstrong & Giardina, 2016).

E-TOURISM 7
This can be used by an individual to contact another person, business to conduct e-commerce and
other promotional activities through social media. Organizations in various other functions like
recruitment activities, to search for a suitable candidate for the vacant position. Similarly, it has
turned out to be helpful for job seekers to search for new job vacancies and apply online (Du &
Bstieler, 2016).
Marketing is the major activity conducted through social media, the reason being the growing
active users over social media sites. One of the major reason for these active users are interaction
among the public, this includes chatting or sending messages through social media (Reid, 2015).
This source has created two-way communication method for the organization, where the
customers can also send messages in form of a comment to organization’s post, which created
more of an interactive way to reach out to audiences (Gong & Yi, 2018).
Social media marketing is been used by the companies to the advertisement, creating brand
awareness, creating brand loyalty among the customers with the help of customers feedback.
This type of marketing is usually targeting young customers that are the customer group of
young people (Hu, et al., 2016). Moreover, celebrities social media pages are also used for this
purpose, to induce customers to make a purchase that is the companies tend to reflect that the
celebrities are using their product or service, to attract more customers, especially if the company
is targeting high-income groups, this is also said as influencer marketing. This is done so as to
affect the opinion of the customers, purchasing behavior of the customers (Kumar, et al., 2018).
Some of the strategies through social media include modeling, social interaction mechanism, and
reinforcement (Mills, 2015).
Social media marketing is the king of internet marketing that includes activities that lead to
achieving marketing and branding goals. This includes posts through brands such as text, blogs,
images, videos, and information that will engage the audience to attract them to make a
purchasing decision (Kowalski, 2015).
Some of the major aspects to be considered important while companies conducting social media
campaigns are
 Content planning – content is the major aspects that the company must decide on,
considering it as the most crucial aspect of planning. As the message, covey through

E-TOURISM 8
social media must be relevant, and according to the brand positioning, the company is
willing to create. Moreover, the company must be consistent with the marketing that
posts must be regular and offer true value to the customer. Moreover, content designing
must be helpful and interesting to attract customers (Mühlbacher, et al., 2016).
 Choice of social media – this is the major aspect for the companies to decide, including
planning over the platform through which the company would like to target the
customers. There are various types of social media platforms, which will be covered in
the next section. The choice plays a major role according to the need of the company and
requirements like the type of message, the cost to the marketing and many more criteria
rate considered (Ottman, 2017).
 Track down of competitors – in order to gain competitive advantage, the company must
have a regular eye on the competitors, this includes analyzing any change in strategy of
the company, or any innovative idea adopted by the competitors, influencing the
activities of the brand. Therefore, the company must have a regular track down of the
competitor’s activities and campaign, not only traditional but on social media as well
(Loewenberger, 2007).
2.2 Types of Social Media
There are various types of social media platform, among them, the focus would be over two
major platforms, described as below:
2.2.1 Facebook
Facebook Inc. is a social networking service company based in California, founded by Mark
Zuckerberg. This is considered to be one of the four largest technology company with Apple,
Google, and Amazon. The company has its initial public offering in 2012, where the value of the
company at billion $104, it is accessed through internet services over various devices like
computers, laptops, or mobile devices. The users needed to create a profile, which includes their
basic information (Pansari & Kumar, 2016). They can use the platform to share their life
incidence in form of text, pictures, videos, check in. according to the records, the user till 2018
beginning was 2.2 billion. From figure 1 from Appendix 1, it can be said that among the top
fifteen popular social media platform, Facebook is the leading platform, which reflects a better
platform for the companies to go for marketing (Mura & Mariani, 2016).