Influence of social media management practices on hotel performance

Abstract Purpose: This paper aims to examine the influence of social media management practices on hotel performance. Originality/value: The hotel industry is undergoing organizational transformations due to the insertion of social media as a communication platform that engages customers. Given this, verifying whether social media can collaborate on internal resources and help the companies’ performance has been a potential source of studies. Design/methodology/approach: The study sample comprised 67 hotels. To this end, hotel managers conducted face-to-face interviews to collect data from their respective hotels. Data were collected using social media management practices and performance measures measured through RevPAR (a revenue division by total rooms available) and online review scores from Booking.com. Exploratory factor analysis and multiple regression analysis were applied to evaluate the study’s hypotheses from a quantitative approach. Findings: It was evidenced that social media management practices can be categorized into monitoring and comment responsing practices and the dimension of responsiveness and information dissemination practices. These practices positively influence hotel performance measured through online review scores and revenue measured through RevPAR. Given the results, it is expected that hotels will have competitive advantages by managing their resources with the help of social media and that studies in this sector will gain more visibility.