TLH312 E-Tourism: Social Media, Mobile & Competitive Advantage

This essay critically evaluates the role of mobile technology and social media marketing in building a competitive advantage for businesses within the tourism and hospitality industries, using a case study of Hilton Hotels. It begins by introducing the increasing importance of digital marketing, including social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and mobile technology in hospitality management. The objectives include understanding social media marketing, its relevance, and how to gain a competitive edge using Facebook and Twitter. The literature review defines social media, its types, and strategies, highlighting Facebook's large user base and Twitter's interactive nature. The case study focuses on Hilton Hotels, analyzing their Facebook and Twitter strategies, including attractive pages, video content, and hashtag strategies. The essay concludes with recommendations and a discussion of the statistical analysis of social media's impact. Desklib provides access to similar solved assignments for students.

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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).

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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).

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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

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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).

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A major reason for companies to go for Facebook as a social media platform for marketing:
2.2.1.1 Largest number of users – as already discussed, the number of users at the platform are
increasing in number every day. The companies have an opportunity to reach out to bullion’s
customers at a single time. This is beneficial for the company to create brand awareness
(Petersen, 2015)
2.2.1.2 Time spent on Facebook – it has been observed that a large number of people spend
maximum time over this social media platform among them all. This means the opportunity for
the company to reach out and influence customer’s increases (Tiago, 2014)
2.2.1.3 Everything feeds into this platform – it has been observed that any activity conducted by
an individual on any other social media platform like Instagram or Twitter are feed into the
Facebook account (Loewenberger, 2007).
2.2.1.4 Innovation – Facebook tends to work for the innovation at this platform, to attract more
users, which is eventually beneficial for the companies to use this social media platform to
market their brand, and promote their products and services (jeffbullas, 2019)
Figure: (Source: (dreamgrow, 2019)

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2.2.2 Twitter
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. However unregistered users are only allowed to read them and not
post any tweet. The platform can be used through mobile device through short message service,
through application software (Bach, 2017). This platform was created by the Jack Dorsey, Biz
Stone, Noah Glass, and Evan in 2006. The platform gradually gained global popularity with 100
million users in 2012, where three million were average tweets of the day. This is not popular as
compared to Facebook, although still a very popular platform, which benefits the companies to
use as a marketing platform (Balmer & Abratt, 2016)
Figure: (Source: (Mura & Mariani, 2016)
From the figure above, it can be said that the people are most likely to view videos over the
social media platforms, which suggest companies to go for a video marketing campaign on social
media to attract more customers (beverland , 2016). Another frequent way to interact is a
comment, for which Twitter can be approachable social media platform, as comments over a
tweet or retweet on tweets are some of the popular activities conducted over this platform
(Ottman, 2017).

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2.3 Strategies of social media
From Appendix 2, it was observed that there are various strategies of social media for the
companies or organizations investing in social media marketing. This reflects 10 major stages in
order to achieve the successful strategy of social media (Mühlbacher, et al., 2016). First is a
selection of social media channel or platform, the second is engagement, which is being social,
and creating a brand presence through social media, then comes up the listening part, which
includes the use of social monitoring tools. Next is the establishment of internal policy, which
provide employee participation in channels of social media (Bakir & Rose, 2015). The
elimination of noise is necessary, which could be hurdle while reaching to the customers, another
step is to be human, so as to create a personal relationship with customers and connect with
customers (Tuten & Ashley, 2015). Next stage is to ensure that the company does not ignore
being social at the time of crisis. Next step is very crucial, that is ensuring security through being
careful by the companies who are having the keys to social media user. Creating a stronger
presence through mobile social revolution would be the next step, and the last one would be
staying current, that is always being updated (businesstopia, 2018).
3. Methodology
There are various research methods, for instance, qualitative research and quantitative research.
For the study of this field, the approachable research method focused is the qualitative research
method. Qualitative research is majorly based on words, emotions, feelings, sounds and more
unquantifiable and non-numerical elements. The qualitative information is not liable to analyze
through mathematical techniques (Craig & Douglas, 2015).
The data collection is another aspect to decide for conducting research, for this research report,
the considered type of data collection would be secondary research. This means that the
information which is already existing or are already available are used for analyzing the research.
This includes sources like company’s report, newspaper, journal, authenticate or official online
sources for collection of data to be used in the research (Feng & Chari, 2018)
According to the nature of the study, the types of research methods are analytical research or
descriptive research. For this research, the analytical research method would be used. According

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to this method, the research is supposed to use the information or facts which is already available
are used for analysis for critical evaluation of the study (Day, 2014)
4. Case Study
Hilton brands are one of the popular global hospitality company, on which various case studies
exist. Considering the social media study, one of its case study “Social media analytics:
Extracting and visualizing Hilton hotel ratings and reviews from Trip Advisor (Chang, et al.,
2017),” which would further discuss in detail.
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. The article included the ubiquitous internet service as a major platform for information
diffusion. According to today’s scenario, the most popular social media platform that are
enabling users to keep up their point of view to the companies are Facebook, Twitter and some e-
commerce companies like Amazon. Moreover, considering the hotel industry, some of the
mobile applications and e-commerce sites like trip advisors, which are providing the customers
place to rate the service received by them for each visited hotel. These are the place which is
majorly responsible for the brand positioning and loyalty. In today’s world, where the customers
are becoming smart and prefer to check the provided rating to the company by customers already
experienced. These are the major aspects in the social media marketing that has to be considered
by the companies, for instance, the Hilton group in this case. However, these can be helpful for
the companies, to improve their activities and services for increasing the customer satisfaction,
which would be beneficial for the company in long run (chiefoutsiders, 2018) (Chang, et al.,
2017).
The case also studied the internet search results, according to which the search engines like
Google enable the customers to reach to eth relevant information online with the help of typing
keywords. These depend on the search frequency or search volume for particular data or
information. For instance, Google trends are useful for the public to explore trending stories,
these are based on Google search results and the current search index. In the tourism industry,
consumers are using Google for planning travels, like destination hotel list, traveling mode
information. From figure at appendix 3, it indicated the Google trends for the Hilton hotel, with a