Social Media Research in the Hotel Industry: A Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

Social media has become an indispensable marketing tool for tourism and hospitality, emerging as critical platforms for interaction and communication between brands and consumers. In the hotel industry, as in other sectors, social media plays an essential role in affecting the consumer journey and reshaping managerial practices. The remarkable growth of social media over the past decade has boosted interest in social media research, and the number of publications and citations on this theme has increased in recent years. The objective of this study is to review relevant literature pertaining to social media in the hotel industry using bibliometric analysis. It aims at portraying the current state of the art in this subfield of research, which is expected to continue growing and to identify future research opportunities. The present study uses VOSviewer to analyze research 973 documents published from 2017 to 2021, under the category “Hospitality, Leisure, Sports, Tourism,” collected from the Web of Science database. The analysis uncovers three key research groups and topics addressed in the extant literature on social media in the hotel industry: (1) “E-consumer behavior,” referring to social media influence on the customer decision-making process, customers’ perceptions of hotel services, as well as their evaluation of the hotel experience; (2) “Digital strategies for hotel businesses,” describing how social media can be part of the hotel strategy under different perspectives and unveiling the effect of social media on hotel performance; and (3) “Approaches to social media research in the hotel industry,” focusing on current research approaches, such as the use of sentiment analysis by the hotel industry, and the rise of big data and social media analytics.