Last year when I visited Taiwan, I was taken aback by the multi-cultural environment and the vibrancy of the city Taipei, However, as an average tourist, its not very hard to notice that the businesses are still getting accustomed to the cross-cultural dynamics since the city was recently opened up to international tourism. In this context, I thought, it would be interesting to explore some of the best practices that the industries such as hospitality and services that are most impacted by increased tourism could follow so as to stay competitive and gain the greater market shares.

In this context, I have decided to review the article “Facebook as international e-marketing strategy for Taiwan Hotels”. This article explains a study conducted on the e-marketing strategies for 5 major Taiwan hotels and recommends specific actions in order to implement an e-marketing strategy using Facebook. Further analysis of this article enabled me to establish certain best practices that could be used for any hotel that aims to implement a global e-marketing strategy.

Study Methodology

Owing to the staggering increase in number of tourists coming into the city, Top hotels in Taiwan saw a big increase in number of foreign visitors. However, the hotels didn’t have a clear strategy to attract and spread the word-of-mouth through these foreign visitors in order to have greater brand recognition. This was important as various research reports suggested that about 65% of business travelers and 64% of leisure travelers internationally use online methods to learn about and book hotels in Taiwan.

The study focused on 6 top hotels in Taiwan and analyzed their usage of social media (mainly Facebook ) . The study focused on the following areas

• How the hotels used Facebook to communicate and spread offers to influence sales
• How well have the hotels succeeded in communicating and spreading marketing offers using Facebook
• How do intervening factors explain international e-marketing success.
• How Hotels can expand Facebook use as a manner of widening their international network.

Analysis of issues

The study highlighted a lot of positive strategies that the Hotels were following in order to get better user engagement and following but the study found three specific areas of challenges that most of the Hotels had to overcome to implement an effecting social media strategy.

1. Language: Most of the Facebook pages were constructed in simplified Chinese language that was friendly to neighboring countries but majority of the international customers were coming from USA and UK. Though the Facebook has a language translate option, the marketing messages in translated language don’t have a similar impact on the user. Hence it was impetrative to have a strategy that could appeal to both Chinese and English speakers. Also about half these hotels did not even show up when searched for them using a profile that had English language setting.

2. Engagement using content: Among the Hotels in the study, there were only 2 Hotels that had a healthy engagement from the user base. The content published by other hotels were not being liked or commented on by the user base so these hotels had to find a way to increase the interactivity on their pages.

3. Frequency of posts: At least 2 hotels, though had a sizeable following, were not engaging the users enough through frequent publishing. They would only many 4-5 posts a month. The gap between the posts was a problem because it indicates disengaged fan base.

It was established that hotels in Taiwan should concentrate on 2 areas to optimize Facebook as a marketing tool. Language was the most important criteria. The article provides 3 alternatives to solve this problem

• Create separate but identical fan page with one page set in English
• Using Facebook API’s to provide translate option within the same page.
• Using third party service such as Facebook connect to provide translation service

In my perspective, though the first option is attractive, it would involve a lot of overheads in terms of maintaining and updating the page, specially considering that the objective is to increase the published post, so I think the second option is a good way to enhance global exposure for companies that find themselves in such a position. Secondly such businesses could follow an approach where the content shared is more visual thereby eliminating language barriers.

The article also mentions that the hotels that had a good engagement on their page were sharing content that were designed to generate discussion and engagement rather than just promote the hotel. In my perspective, this is the approach that should be followed by rest of the hotels too. However, it can be challenging for a hotel to appeal cross-culturally to its fan base but by creating content on aspects that could appeal globally, e.g.: Food, luxury and travel the hotels could be effective in addressing generically to its fan base.

Key Takeaways

There are many important takeaways from this article by looking at it from a perspective of a hospitality business in an emerging market trying to establish a global presence. It can be interpreted that some of the best practices to follow to establish a Facebook presence is as follows:

• It’s important to use the brand logo as the profile image. It’s mentioned in the article that some hotels were using the pictures of the building as profile images but if they used the logo, they will promote brand recognition and brand loyalty will follow.
• The content has to foster discussion and engagement on the page. Businesses have to prevent themselves from using the Facebook page as a mere Advertising tool.
• Language is very important while creating cross-geography content. Reliance on Google/Facebook translate function is bad because the messages don’t have the same impact. The content must be created in the language of the addressable market and its important for brand to invest in this activity.
• Brands can score themselves against their competition on the following metrics to evaluate their current practices:
  • Presence in Facebook
  • Features selected
  • Quality and volume of content
  • Aesthetics and visual quality
  • Network scope/ reach
  • Interaction quality
  • Language use

Bibliography

Hsu, Y.-L. (2012). Facebook as International emarketing strategy for Taiwan Hotels. International Journal of Hospitality Management , 10.

Appendix – Analysis of current Facebook usage by Hotels in Taiwan.

Current Facebook usage by Hotels in Taiwan