Documenting the Changes of B2C Communications on Facebook from 2010 to 2014

By -
Last, I published a research study in Worldwide Hospitality and Tourism Themes, and I shared a brief discussion about this study on MultiBriefs.com.  In this study, I led a research team to investigate how restaurants' B2C communication strategies evolved on Facebook over time and how consumers' reactions to a variety of Facebook messages changed over time. 

 We analyzed 2,463 Facebook messages initiated by 10 restaurant chains in the fourth quarter of 2010, 2012, and 2014.  We have found status updates experienced a substantial decrease by restaurants while usage of photo updates increased dramatically in the same period.  Photo remained to be the most "popular" media type, receiving most "Likes," comments, and shares from consumers.  Video was not "popular" at all in 2010 but experienced a slight increase in usage and slowly emerged in 2012 and 2014 as another "popular" media. 

 Drawing from the research findings, I made the following recommendations to businesses: 
  1. Engage with Facebook users in a consistent manner. We found that companies could win more customers over time by posting about the same amount of messages over the years.
  2. Post high-quality photos. Because it seems "everyone" knows the power of photos on Facebook, now it may take more than just a regular photo to catch people's attention.
  3. Use other picture-based social media tools to engage customers, such as Instagram and Pinterest.
  4. Choose an eye-catching screen shot for a video cover.

If you are interested in reading more of our findings and implications, please email me for a desk copy of the article for personal usage or download the article online on Emerald Insight.
Have you observed any changes among organizations' or people's behavior on Facebook? Would you mind sharing your observations with us?
#B2C #Communications #Facebook #Research #Longitudinal
Reactions:

Popular posts from this blog

Marketing segmentations for resorts (by Karen Valeria Sandoval)

By -
Image
The Year of 2017 has been a year full of renovations, many of which happened to take place within the hospitality industry. One specific topic is still, and might always be pondering in the minds of those in a hotel's or a resort's Marketing and Advertising Department. Who is the best market to cater to? Or more specifically --- Who is the best market to cater to for 2017-2018? Family vacationers could be the answer. Here is some insight into what families will be looking for and how a resort can get the businesses from family vacationers.


The “adults-only” segment
To answer this question, I took the liberty of investigating through last year's highlights to see what all the fuss was about for “adult-only” resorts and hotels. In 2016, "adult-only" resorts and hotels are popular among honeymoon goers, singles traveling, and overall, couples having some quality time to themselves. What drew them in were resorts based on a coastal, island settings. Such places as the …
Read more

Expedia, Priceline join battle against Airbnb

By -
Image
The growth of Airbnb has made a significant negative impact on hotel business, even though the hotel industry has also been enjoying a steady long-time growth since 2009, as measured in almost all performance indicators including occupancy, average daily rate, revenue per available rooms and number of new hotels open for business.

For hotels, it is a loss of revenue (or uncaptured income) when a traveler chooses to stay in an Airbnb listing rather than a hotel room. Hotels have been trying hard to fight with Airbnb, but it does not seem any of their strategies can actually stop the growth of the room-sharing website. Besides hotels, Airbnb also makes a negative impact on online travel agents (OTAs), such as Expedia and Priceline, especially when Airbnb is aiming to become a true full-service travel enterprise. Because a large portion of OTAs' revenue comes from the commissions on hotel sales, it is also a loss of revenue for OTAs when a traveler books a room elsewhere, either on Air…
Read more

Consumers' path of purchasing a travel product

By -
Image
Hotels have been working hard to win more travelers to "book direct" on their companies' websites, but are consumers listening? In fact, hotels are not alone. All service providers in the hospitality and tourism industry want their customers to make purchases directly on their websites, but consumers want to search and compare various options before making a decision. So, to convince customers to purchase directly on the service providers' websites, companies must understand where their customers "hang out" in the cyber marketplace before they make the purchasing decision, as well as where they end up buying their services. The white paper "Understanding the Travel Consumer's Path to Purchase" by Eye for Travel provides some business intelligence in that regard. The report combined a large panel consumer data of online transactions and surveys into the analysis, revealing the following results: The places where customers purchase a travel produ…
Read more