Brand strategies in social media in hospitality and tourism

This paper aims to present an automated literature analysis to unveil the drivers for incorporating social media in tourism and hospitality brand strategies.

To gather relevant literature, Google Scholar was queried with “brand”/“branding” and “social media” for articles in ten top-ranked tourism and hospitality journals, resulting in a total of 479 collected articles. The methodology adopted for the analysis is based on text mining and topic modeling procedures. The topics discovered are characterized by terms belonging to a dictionary previously compiled and provide a segmentation of the articles in coherent sets of the literature.

Most of the 213 articles that encompass a strong relation between social media and branding are mentioning mainly brand building stages. A large research gap was found in hospitality and tourism considering that, besides advertising, no topic was discovered related to known brand strategies such as co-branding or franchising.

The present analysis concludes that specialized tourism and hospitality literature needs to keep pace with research that is being conducted on a wide range of industries to assess the influence of social media.

The automated analysis approach used has no precedent in tourism and hospitality research. By including an innovative topical concept map, it led to identifying and summarizing the topics, providing a clear picture on the findings. This study calls for research by specialized tourism and hospitality publications, eventually leading to special issues on this vibrant subject.