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Evaluating Facebook pages for small hotels: a systematic approach

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Abstract

Social networking websites play an increasingly important role in hotel promotion and marketing. However, designing effective social networks profiles still presents quite a challenge. To support the development of quality hotels’ profiles, we introduce a systematic approach based on an evaluation model that includes a number of heuristic factors and user ratings. The model was developed for Facebook, the most successful social networking website. The evaluation scheme was developed via (1) an online brainstorming with influential bloggers and experienced web designers and (2) the classification and integration of the evaluation characteristics and criteria. To test the applicability of the model, we performed an exploratory study on selected Facebook pages of small hotels in Italy and submitted them to a user evaluation. The results validated our model and highlighted that hotels can implement the model to optimize their pages in a number of ways to better exploit their Facebook presence.

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Notes

  1. See for example data published on www.blizzardinternet.com, www.comscore.com, www.emarketer.com, www.isnart.it.

  2. Information about the success of Facebook can be found at www.alexa.com/siteinfo/facebook.com; http://www.marketingcharts.com/updates/top-10-social-networking-websites-forums-March-2014-41850/.

  3. Data about world Internet usage, population and many statistics are featured at www.internetworldstats.com.

  4. A description of the approaches hotels are using on Facebook is given in (ReviewPro 2011).

  5. Other information about the differences between a page and a personal profile on Facebook is available at: https://www.facebook.com/help/217671661585622.

  6. A large bibliography of models defined to evaluate the quality of websites is given at http://etourism.economia.unitn.it/bibliography_items/index/1.

  7. In the present document, profile refers to a generic web presence on a given social networking website, not to e.g. Facebook profiles or pages (http://facebook.about.com/od/Basics/fr/Facebook-Profile-Vs-Facebook-Page-Vs-Facebook-Group.htm).

  8. See the schema proposed in www.socialmediaexaminer.com/how-to-build-a-free-social-media-monitoring-dashboard.

  9. See blogs such as The influential marketing www.rohitbhargava.com; Hubspot, www.hubspot.com.

  10. See footnote 5 for the use of profile (presence on any social networking website) vs. page (profile on Facebook).

  11. “The goal of the scientist is to create simple models that have a great deal of explanatory power. Such models are called parsimonious models. In most cases, however, simple yet powerful models are not available (…). A trade-off occurs between the power of the model and the number of simplifying assumptions made about the world.”, http://www.psychstat.missouristate.edu/introbook/sbk04.html.

  12. A complete definition is given at http://www.w3.org/2002/Talks/0104-usabilityprocess/slide3-0.html.

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Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank those who have collaborated in the model definition, validation steps and application: bloggers, web engineers and marketing experts, the hotel owners who accepted to be interviewed, and Martina Ambrosi for her help in collecting the initial dataset. Authors would also thank the reviewers for their useful remarks and suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Trento, Trento, Italy

    Luisa Mich

  2. Master in Economics and Tourism and Dondena Center for Research on Social Dynamics, Bocconi University, Milan, Italy

    Rodolfo Baggio

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  1. Luisa Mich
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  2. Rodolfo Baggio
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Correspondence to Luisa Mich.

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Mich, L., Baggio, R. Evaluating Facebook pages for small hotels: a systematic approach. Inf Technol Tourism 15, 209–231 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40558-015-0031-2

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