Understanding the role of firm-generated content by hotel segment: the case of Twitter

초록

Although user-generated content (UGC) and firm-generated content (FGC) on social media are vital for firm performance, yet researchers interested in such content have largely examined only UGC's effects on consumer behaviour. The objective of this research is to expand the understanding of firm-generated content (FGC) in the hotel segment. Specifically, this study tackles two research objectives: to explore key hidden topics embedded in firm-generated content in the hotel segment and (2) to compare topic probability in the hotel segment. We collected data from the Twitter profiles of ten active hotel companies. All tweets available in these ten hotels' Twitter accounts were crawled, resulting in 175,358 tweets written between 2012 and 2016. We used Python scripts and Twitter API credentials for the data collection followed by sentiment analysis and topic modelling for the investigation. We found three latent topics related to firm-generated content in the hotel segment, including information giving (one-way communication), interactive communication, and service recovery. Moreover, we found strategic messaging in the firm-generated content used by the hotel segment to attract and manage its consumers.

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