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publication: 16 December 2019
Institute of Hospitality Webinar
How Do … & How To … ?
What Are Hotels Currently Doing on YouTube and What More Could Be Done?
Social media is of great importance to hotels. This has been shown by much research published in respectable hospitality journals.
Generally speaking, there are three main categories of social media sites relevant for hotels and hospitality enterprises:
1. Review sites: such as TripAdvisor.
2. Social networking sites: such as Facebook or Twitter.
3. Multi-media creation and sharing sites: such as Vimeo, Tiktok, and YouTube.
In Dr. Ran Zhang's Institute of Hospitality webinar, he focuses on the last category and specifically discusses how hotels use YouTube for promotion and communication purposes. He presents a descriptive investigation involving 27 five-star properties in Amsterdam and explore how five-star hotels in the Amsterdam city center area engage in content creation on YouTube.
Some of the key findings presented in the webinar include:
1. Among the 27 properties included in the study, 24 of them have (at least) one YouTube channel.
2. Among the analyzed YouTube channels, there is much variance in terms of key YouTube engagement indicators: views, videos, and subscribers.
3. The different levels of engagement and performance are best explained by the differences in the amount and types of content created and uploaded to the channels by the different hotels.
A video containing a portion of the webinar and addressing follow-up questions can be viewed for free here:
The recording of the full webinar is viewable on the website of the Institute of Hospitality (registration required):
