Engaging with Customer Using Social Media Platform: A Case Study of Malaysia Hotels

Abstract

Social media is gaining its popularity among hotel operators as one of the important platforms to market their facilities and establish relationship with customers. In general, most of previous studies that examine this topic focuses on the effects of using social media among hotel operators (i.e., electronic words of mouth); and examine the adoption issue of this platform. However not much of attention given towards understanding how hotels are utilizing this platform to engage with their customers. This study aims to understand the implementation, challenges and technique used to measure the level of engagement using social media platform among hotel operators in Malaysia. This study adopts a qualitative case study approach and the data are collected using a semi-structured interviewing technique. The data were analyzed using content analysis technique. In general, the results indicated that five-star hotels in Malaysia is not utilizing Facebook platform at its fullest potentials. Hotel operators are having challenges in maintaining the level of engagement with the customers and above all, hotel operators in Malaysia does not have good knowledge on how to measure their level of engagement with the customers. This study ended with suggestions on how to measure customer level of engagement using Facebook platform and discussion related to research limitations.