Corporate Twitter Use and Stakeholder Engagement: An Empirical Analysis of the Spanish Hotel Industry
IntroductionThe trend of social media has become unstoppable. According to Statista (2015a) there are 1.96 billion social network users worldwide. Given that figure, nowadays, an increasing number of companies are using social media as a tool to communicate with their stakeholders. Using social media platforms can help companies to set up a two way communication protocol with their stakeholders (Bonson and Flores, 2011; Hsu, 2012; Lee et al. 2012) and this not only generates stakeholder engagement and loyalty (Wang and Fesenmaier, 2004) but also creates a better image of the companies, which helps to improve their online reputation (De Moya and Jain, 2013) Several studies point out the importance of social media to the topic of customer relationship, loyalty management and public engagement (Brodie et al. 2011; Lee et al. 2013) With the rapid development of social media, scholars also analyse how professionals can take advantage of this online tool to help them gain a better understanding of their customers' needs and the factors that drive stakeholders to engage with companies. However, little is known about how Twitter is being used in the hospitality sector to engage with stakeholders. Previous studies focus on the general usage of Twitter rather than its application in the tourism sector; therefore, it is worthwhile extending the earlier W eb 2.0 research to explore this phenomenon.The main objective of this paper is to provide an initial assessment of communication and stakeholder engagement practices using Twitter in hotel chains. The paper aims to answer the following questions. (1) To what extent do hotel chains use Twitter as a communication channel to engage with their stakeholders? (2) Which factors influence the Twitter activity of hotel chains? (3) Which factors influence the stakeholder engagement on Twitter?In this study, we focus on the social network Twitter, given that it is the largest micro blog site and the second largest social media platform that is used in business (Statista, 2015b) In addition, it focuses on information and opinion sharing (Kwak, Changhun and Moon, 2010) and on prompting conversation rather than just self presentation (Kietzman et al. 2011) It is not only a social media platform on which its users can connect with their family, friends or co workers; it also offers an opportunity for companies to interact with different types of individuals and allows them to broadcast information. It is recognised by strategic communicators for its ability to reach a large number of stakeholders, allowing organisations to make better use of social media for the purposes of public relations, advertising and marketing campaigns (Stelzner, 2012).An increasing number of companies are tending to use social media as a new and creative way to communicate with their stakeholders and to achieve stronger engagement (Lai and Li, 2005; Mangold and Faulds, 2009; Men and Tsai, 2013) According to Stelzner (2012) Facebook and Twitter are the top two choices for marketers and nearly all marketers with more than three years of experience in social media use Twitter (91% Consultants emphasize the importance of building a social media strategy to raise virtual communities and strengthen engagement (Li and Bernoff, 2008; Solis and Breakenridge, 2009) Academics claim that online tools can be seen as a means to maintain and manage customer relationships (Boyd and Ellison, 2007; Chan and Guillet, 2011; Garau Vadell and Orfila Sintes, 2008; Schmidt et al. 2008) and that using social media platforms helps organisations to disseminate and exchange information rapidly and to obtain real time feedback and engagement in conversation (Lovejoy et al. 2012).According to Crotts (1999) the hospitality industry is a service oriented industry, in which the majority of goods and services are experiential, which makes reviews from customers very important for potential customers. Thus, the rapid development of new technologies, such as Web 2.