Social media content strategy in hospitality: the impact of experiential posts and response congruence on engagement, hotel image, and booking intention

This study aims to address the role of content type in social media posts and the influence of management response congruence on improving user engagement, booking intention and hotel brand image. An online between-subjects factorial experimental design with 559 subjects from a consumer panel was performed to test the proposed model. The empirical evidence suggests that congruency should be considered a key moderating variable when assessing the impact of content and messages on social media since it might significantly change how content affects online users’ decision-making process. If hotel management is thus unable to properly manage its responses to users’ comments in a congruent way, posts related to the ambience dimension become more important. Furthermore, congruence between a published post and the subsequent management response to user comments effectively leads to higher engagement, functional brand image, hedonic brand image and booking intention than incongruent or no management response.