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Procedia Computer Science 00 (2018) 000–000
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Procedia Computer Science 124 (2017) 4–11

4th Information Systems International Conference 2017, ISICO 2017, 6-8 November 2017, Bali,
Indonesia

Engaging with Customer Using Social Media Platform: A Case

Study of Malaysia Hotels
Kamarul Faizal Hashima*, Nawar Abbood Fadhilb
a
College of Engineering & IT, University of Dubai, P.O Box 14143, Dubai, UAE
b
Department of Information Techniques, Technical College of Management, Iraq

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.

© 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.

Peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the 4th Information Systems International Conference 2017.

Keywords: Social media; Interactions; Online engagement; Tourism and Hospitality.

* Corresponding author. Tel.: +9714 5566944

E-mail address: kbinhashim@ud.ac.ae

1877-0509 © 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.

Peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the 4th Information Systems International Conference 2017.

1877-0509 © 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.

Peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the 4th Information Systems International Conference 2017
10.1016/j.procs.2017.12.123
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1. Introduction

The emergent of social media technologies have benefited hotel operators in promoting their hotel locally and
internationally. Nowadays, travellers are passionate to share their travel and vacation experiences on the social media
platform. They shared not only positive comments, but also negative comments based on their vacation experiences
[1]. Social media is becoming an important tool used to assist travellers in planning their vacations [2]. Through social
media platform, a traveller can gather information about travel’s destination, accommodation, tour and
attractions/promotions [3,4]. Besides benefiting travellers, social media technologies are helping hotel operators
engage with current and potential customers [5,6]. Through social media, hotel operators can understand the needs of
their customers and compete against their competitors better [7,8,9]. Despite the advantages of this platform, hotel
operators are also exposed to the negative effects of this online platform if it is not managed effectively. For instance,
allowing questions or feedback unattended for some period of times indicate that the hotel operators are not serious in
listening to what the customers are telling them [10]. This on the other hands will turn to negative words of mouth that
might affect the hotel’s reputation. In this study, customer engagement is defined as communication between
customers and hotels operators using social media. Understanding how hotel engage with their customer is important
as it is one of the critical approach to ensure continuous relation with customer using social media platform [11]. This
continuous relationship is important towards ensuring hotel operator’s online presence and sustainability [12].
From the literature analysis, it shows that most of previous studies that examine social media in tourism and
hospitality domain are mainly focusing on the effects of using social media platform (i.e., electronic word of mouth).
Besides that, previous studies are also directed towards examining the adoption issue related to this platform. Despite
all the attention given, very few study focuses on understanding how hotels are utilising this platform to engage with
their customers. This lack of focus has led to the used of social media platform by customers to share negative
experiences after visiting hotel in Malaysia [1]. These negative comments should be handled carefully through proper
engagement between hotel operators and customers. This claim has interested this research to examine how do hotel
operators in Malaysia manage their social media platform? What are the challenges hotel operators in Malaysia are
facing when managing this platform? And how do hotel operators in Malaysia measure their level of engagement with
their customers using this platform? Thus, by examining these research questions, this study can fill in the gap by
providing a better understanding about the utilisation of social media platform among hotel operators in Malaysia
towards establishing better customer engagement.
This paper is organised as follow. The first (this) section outlines the research motivations. The second section
discusses the literature reviews related to the topic of this study. The third section discusses the research method. The
fourth section presents the research findings. The final section concludes by addressing the contributions of this study.

2. Previous studies on social media in hotel

The proliferation of social media usage among hotel operators has dramatically changed how hotel produce, market
and deliver their products/services and communicate both internally and externally with their customers [13]. The
adoption of this technology seems to be inevitable because of the benefits that it provides [14] and becoming crucial
to hotel industry [15]. Social media is becoming one of the valuable marketing tools among hotel operators [16].
About seventy-five percent of hotels are using social media for marketing purposes and Facebook and Twitter have
been identified as the top two social media tools used by hotel operators. Through social media, hotels are
disseminating information, promotion sales and attracting potential and returning customers. Hotels are coming out
with many innovative ways to promote their hotel using social media [17]. Many researchers concluded that online
user reviews through social media have a persuasive impact on online sale for hotels (e.g., [18], [19]). Besides acting
as a marketing tool, social media is also used as one of the main communication channels for the hotel to connect with
existing and potential customers online [20, 21]. Social media is used as a communication medium for hotels to
understand customer’s needs and try to provide the best of services by the hotel to customers [22].
In general, it can be concluded that most of the previous studies that focused on this topic mainly concentrated on
the adoption issue (e.g., understanding user’s perception to adopt social media) ([23], [24]), examining the value of
information shared on social media by hotel operators [25]; understanding the effects of word of mouth created using
social media and analyzing the level of usage among hotel operators [26]. However, how hotel operators are operating
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this platform for their own benefits (i.e., engaging with customers) is not clear. Thus motivated by that, this exploratory
research is interested to answer the following research questions: i) how hotel operators are using Facebook to support
customer engagement activities? And how they are motivating customers to participate? ii) how do hotel operators
measure level of customer engagement using Facebook? iii) what are issues or challenges faced by hotel operators in
operating their social media platform? Who is responsible in managing this platform?

3. Research Methodology

3.1. Respondents

In this study, the focused is given only to 5 stars’ hotel in Malaysia. Five stars hotels in Malaysia was chosen as a
case study because of its convenience. Researcher is based in Malaysia when the research was conducted. Meanwhile
five stars hotel categories were chosen due to suggestions from previous studies that this type of hotels might provide
a better understanding of how hotel operators used online platform. According to [28] these hotels usually have the
expertise, financial resources and technical ability to manage social media platform in a professional manner. Thus,
based on that arguments, it justified the selection of five-star hotels as respondents of this study.
This study invited 20 five-star hotels in Malaysia to participate in the interview sessions, but only five hotels
agreed to participate. The list of five stars hotels was obtained from a hotel online booking site (www.booking.com).
Despite the small number of respondents, this study believes it is still sufficient because a sample of five or six may
be sufficient for the researcher intending to achieve additional supported data or having an exploratory research
objective [29]. Since the main objective of this study is exploratory in nature, thus a sample of five respondents is
sufficient and acceptable for the objective of this study. The face to face interview took three weeks to complete and
each interview took about 50 to 75 minutes. Each interview was conducted at the hotel where the participants were
working and it is conducted in English.

3.2 Demographic Profile of Respondents

In general, all the respondents have a good understanding of how social media is used by hotel. Majority of them
have involved directly or indirectly with either managing, using or monitoring hotel’s social media platform. In term
of working experience in hotel industry, majority of the respondents have a working experience of three years and
more. Majority of the respondents are holding a managerial position and most of them coming from marketing
department. Thus, it can be concluded that the profile of the respondents is suitable and helpful for researchers to
achieve its research objective. Table 1 illustrates the demographic statistics for the respondents.

Table 1. Respondents Demographic

ID Position Years of experience Gender Age
P1 Marketing executive 8 years Female 35
P2 Online marketing executive 2 years Female 29
P3 Marketing and communication manager 3 years Female 28
P4 Senior guest service manager 3 years Male 29
P5 Management Information system MIS manager 7 years Male 32

3.3 Data Analysis

In this study, five open-ended questions were asked to the respondents. The following sections describe the research
findings based on the five questions asked during the interview sessions.

Q1: How does your hotel use Facebook to support engagement with customers?
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Since using social media is significant to increase the engagement and interaction between hotel and customers, all
respondents acknowledged the importance to actively update the information provided on the page. All respondents
agreed that one of the most important activities that need to be done is to update the Facebook page on a regular basis.
Hotel operators should always make sure the customers were always updated with new promotions and events
conducted by the hotel operators. Besides that, the respondents also mentioned the need to always post the pictures
and videos related to the activities conducted by the hotels. Creating suitable content is very important to create an
interactive atmosphere between customer and hotels. Besides giving information about hotel’s promotions, three out
of five participants mentioned that Facebook is also used to reply to customer’s queries, complaint acknowledged and
comments. Not being able to respond to customers might lead to loss of customers.
“…It is very important to reply all enquiries/comments posted ... If customers have a question, we must reply to them
immediately…if they see the hotel as effective in responding their enquiries, it will create positive early bonding with
the customers…if you are not being responsive they will start going to another page” (P1)
“People share almost everything on Facebook...they have no problem sharing their bad experiences with their stay
with the hotel… So, whenever we know there is negative issue related to our hotel, we will contact them directly and
try to solve the problem” (P2)
“…Making the customer happy is the most challenging part… we try our best to follow up all comments and
complaints from guests…” (P5)

Q2: How does your hotel measure the level of customer’s engagement using Facebook?
Based on the analysis it was noted that there are two approaches used by hotel operators to measure their level of
customer’s engagement using Facebook – i) using analytical tools available online; and ii) manual observation of
activities taken place on others Facebook account. Although, Facebook-analytic function was used, but their level of
knowledge on how to take advantage from the analysis is still at infancy level.
“Yes, we do. We measure the statistics using Facebook analytic features. We analyse the statistics every week…” (P1)
“Although we used the analytic functions, but the analysis generated are basic and we are still learning on how to
take advantage from the analysis.” (P3)

Besides using analytical tools, two of five participants observe others online activities by monitoring the number
of likes, the number of comments, notifications and number of the page shared.
“We don’t use any tools, we only observe how famous other post (advertisement material)” (P2)
“Most of the time we observe any comments related to use in tripadvisor.com, booking.com, and Facebook…” (P4)

Usually, when monitoring their online engagement, hotel operators will give attention towards number of pages
likes given by customers. This is the most important indicators that they used to demonstrate that their customer is
engaging with their hotel:
“Our focus is on the number of likes per week because it represents the number of our followers/fans” (P1)
“The first thing I see is how many like increase for a day…” (P3)
“In fact, when I open the hotel Facebook account, the first thing I will focus to is the number of ‘likes’… because we
need to see how many likes we have” (P4)

Besides number of likes, participants also focus on the comments posted.

“…if someone comment it means that they are interested with our hotel, promotion or package… that is a good signal”
(P1)
“We always give priority in identifying negative comments... if not handled carefully, usually customer will start
sharing their bad experiences to their network of friends…” (P2)
“By answering customers’ enquiries, we know that our hotel is always in their list when they visited Langkawi…” P4

Q3: Who is responsible for maintaining or developing strategy campaign, using hotel Facebook page?
All the participants mentioned that there are specific personnel responsible for managing their Facebook page and
mainly these personnel are from the marketing department. These department are responsible to prepare the marketing
strategy, policy and guidelines. They are also responsible to make all the marketing resources.
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“We also have our head office that makes all the guidelines that we follow” (P2)
“We actually have support from our corporate office bases in Singapore, it is the major corporate office, so we get
support from them…basically, the strategy comes from them and on a local level we adapt for ourselves…” (P3)

Q4: How does your hotel motivate customers to engage with your Facebook account?
The participants have various ideas about how to make the engagement with customers. Two out of five participants
stated they motivate the customer to engage with the Facebook page through giving the guests gifts or free services
during their stay.
“We are offering our guest who checks-in their stay using Facebook, a free 20 minutes foot massage... if your picture
or video is acknowledge as attractive and can promote the hotel, we might give the customer 1 night stay with the
hotel…We are using the power of crowd to help promote our hotel” (P1)
“Prizes and gifts from hotel always help to boost hotel’s increase their number of likes and post/comments etc.” (P2)

From the analysis, hotel operators also invite popular individuals (e.g., actors, singers) to become their guests.
Usually, hotel will promote their positive experience as marketing strategies to engage with potential customers.
Customers usually will respond positively to this type of posting. That mentioned by one participant:
“Recently we start using YouTube influence characters. For example, we have people who are famous on YouTube
but they are not Hollywood stars, we have them at the hotel for free for two night and then they have maybe 200,000
followers, 300,000 followers. So, they post, post, post … and within one week we can see an increase of 100 or 200
likes for social media pages.” (P4)

Finally, hotels also highlight customer positive experience and used it as their promotion materials. Customers
usually feel honoured when hotel showcase their vacation and experience to wider audiences. This stated by one
participant
“So, if they take a nice picture we will re-post it and thank them for the picture and then they feel honoured to have
their picture feature on our page” also mentioned “if we have media that checked in the hotel and they want to write
something nice, we will repost it. Like a nice text and nice review then we will repost them” (P1)

Q5: What are the difficulties faced by your hotel when trying to increase the level of customer’s engagement?
From the interview, providing quick feedback from customer’s inquiries has been identified as one of the major
challenges faced by hotel’s operator. One out of five participants referred that customers usually expect hotel
operators to provide real-time response to inquiries or comments.
“I think one of the biggest challenges is to respond to customer on time. We work on shift basis and try to maximize
our working operation. Rarely are we able to answer a customer’s questions on time…” (P3)

Not only that, hotel operators are also having challenges to come out with good and creative promotion materials
to increase participation from the customers. One of the participants stated that creating fresh and interesting content
is very important to increase the number of likes and followers.
“…the only difficulty is that if you don’t post you don’t increase the number of likes…if you are not active for a week
or two, you might reduce the hotel visibility on Facebook. The materials produced by the head quarter is not on daily
basis.” (P1)

Finally, three of five participants also highlighted the need to have dedicated personnel that is responsible for
managing the Facebook account. The respondents also highlighted that the individual in charge of the Facebook
account should have good communication skills. Having the ability to communicate in multi languages is additional
value to hotel operators.
“I think managing the company’s Facebook account requires a full-time worker, it is not something someone do it on
part time basis. He/she should also have good communication skill, good in English and possible know other
languages too…” (P3)
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4. Discussion

Malaysia hotel used social media platform as one of its main interaction channels with their customers. The
interaction usually started with sharing of marketing content on their social media platform. Usually base on these
marketing contents, it will start new conversations or interactions between customers and hotel. Customers usually
interact with each other either by sharing their joyful or bad experiences going to certain hotels or travel destinations.
According [30], interesting content posted on social media can motivate customers to interact actively with the
platform.
Besides posting interesting marketing materials, the results also show that hotel also motivates their customer to
interact with hotel’s social media platform by rewarding them with gifts. Gifts can act as a mechanism for hotel
operators to encourage customers to be more active online [31]. Another approach used by Malaysia hotels to increase
engagement within customer is to use celebrities or famous characters to share their experiences staying in their hotel.
The hotel usually will post and highlight the stay of these people as hotel’s weekly or monthly highlight. Through this
posting, usually it can create many likes and increase hotel’s online presence.
Besides being used as an interaction channel, social media platform is also used as hotel virtual front office. Hotels
are using social media as a platform to receive complaints, feedback and suggestions. Being able to respond quickly
to these feedbacks is important. The negligence of the customers’ complaints and queries will lead to losing of
customers and creating a negative impression about the hotel. Customers now can use social media to complain more
directly, conveniently, and effectively than ever before, thus not responding quickly will lead the customer to viral the
comments to another platform [32].
In term of challenges faced by hotel to increase the level of engagement is to have a dedicated staff who is
knowledgeable and able to handle customer’s queries and comment professionally. The need to be bi-lingual is
becoming a must as nowadays customers are coming from every corner of the world. Having individual who can
communicate in many languages is a bonus for the hotels. Also, hotels should need to pay attention on how to provide
fast and accurate information to customers. The customer is deciding based on the feedback received posted on social
media. Being able to assist them in a timely manner might help increase the chances that customer will choose their
hotel. Not only that, the result of this study also shows that coming out with innovative marketing materials, value for
money offers and interesting advertisement are becoming one of the challenges for hotel operators to keep customers
coming to their social media pages.
One of the crucial findings of this study is that hotel in Malaysia is not having many ways of measuring their level
of engagement with customers using social media. The research finding highlighted that majority of the respondents
measure the level of engagement simply by observing contents from other hotel’s social media pages. Usually, they
will benchmark their social media pages with other hotels by observing another post, the number of likes, and the
number of comments and examine how other hotels engage with their customers. Hotel operators in Malaysia are
ignoring other functionalities in social media (Facebook) which is very useful indicator to measure their level of
engagement with the customer using Facebook.

5. Conclusion and Research Limitations

As a conclusion for this study, hotel operators in Malaysia is not utilising the full potential of Facebook platform
to increase their level of engagement with customers. Based on this research findings, the hotel operators have limited
knowledge on how to measure their level of engagement with customers. Understanding how to measure the level of
engagement can help Malaysian hotels to operate their social media platform more systematically and effectively.
Thus, to increase the level of customer engagement, Malaysian hotels should give attention to the following
dimensions of customer engagement when using Facebook platform. According to [10], customer engagement can be
represented by five dimensions, they are: i) awareness, ii) attitude expression, iii) voicing of opinion, iv) advocacy
and v) loyalty. Table 2 defined each of the dimension in details.
Meanwhile, Table 3 shows how these dimensions is measured using Facebook’s functionalities. Knowing of which
functionalities to focus can help hotel operators analyze their customer level of engagement better and more
accurately.
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Table 2. Dimensions of Engagement and Its Definition

Dimension Definition
Awareness Measures of consumer’s realization of the Facebook page.
Attitude expression Measures of consumer’s acceptance regarding to content posted on the Facebook page.
Voicing of opinion Measures of consumer’s feedback regarding to content posted on the Facebook page.
Advocacy Measures of consumer’s word-of-mouth activities or spread of content posted on the Facebook page.
Loyalty Measures the number of offline consumer involve with hotel’s activities.

Table 3. Facebook’s Functionalities to Measure Engagement Dimensions

Dimension Facebook’s Functionality
Awareness Number of page like
Attitude expression Number of post like
Voicing of opinion Number of post commented
Advocacy Number of post shared
Loyalty Number of check in by consumers

This study encourage further study is conducted to empirically analyse the level of engagement of Malaysian hotels
by focusing on these dimensions and functionalities. This finding can help Malaysian hotels to overcome their lack of
engagement with customers using Facebook platform. This analysis can help Malaysian hotel improve which
dimensions of engagement they are weak and required further attention.
The current study has some limitations. Firstly, this study focused solely on five-star hotels in Malaysia although
there are still many other types of hotels available (e.g., four-star hotels, three-star hotels, bed and breakfast etc.).
Future study can extend this study by conducting the same interview to another type of hotels. Perhaps it might give
a different understanding of how others manage, utilise and coordinate the used of social media platform in their
organisation. The second limitation of this study is related to the selection of the social media platform. This study
only focuses on Facebook as social media platform when conducting the interview. Focusing on other types of social
media platform might give a different view on how to use this platform to engage with customers.
In general, it can be concluded that hotel in Malaysia is using social media platform as a marketing tool for their
hotel. From the interview, hotel operators have a good idea on how to utilise social media to share their marketing
content. Hotel operators also have their own innovative ways of attracting customer to visit their social media page.
The research finding also indicates that hotel operator in Malaysia does not have a good idea on how to take advantage
of social media platform functionalities to measure their level of engagement with customers. Currently, interaction
with customers is observed manually by doing a simple comparison with other hotels. Finally, hotel operators in
Malaysia are struggling to find suitable personnel to manage their social media platform. Choosing the right personnel
is important as social media is becoming hotel virtual front office. Selecting a multilingual, good interpersonal skills
and professional is the key characteristics to ensure hotel’s social media platform is managed effectively.

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