Evaluating Facebook pages for small hotels: a systematic approach

Social networking websites play an increasingly important role in hotel promotion and marketing. However, designing effective social networks profiles still presents quite a challenge. To support the development of quality hotels’ profiles, we introduce a systematic approach based on an evaluation model that includes a number of heuristic factors and user ratings. The model was developed for Facebook, the most successful social networking website. The evaluation scheme was developed via (a) an online brainstorming with influential bloggers and experienced web designers and (b) the classification and integration of the evaluation characteristics and criteria. To test the applicability of the model, we performed an exploratory study on selected Facebook pages of small hotels in Italy and submitted them to a user evaluation. The results validated our model and highlighted that hotels can implement the model to optimize their pages in a number of ways to better exploit their Facebook presence.