Social Media as a Marketing Strategy in Hospitality: Case Study of the Braga City

Social media is a powerful tool for creating a closer relationship with customers and potential customers, allowing hotels to communicate directly with them, answer questions, receive feedback and provide real-time customer support. They are a highly effective digital marketing channel for hotels, as they allow them to promote their services, present their differentials and attractions and show their facilities. This investigation seeks to understand how social networks, as a digital marketing strategy, in hotels in the city of Braga, are important and how they contribute to the dissemination and promotion of hotels. The tourist developments in the municipality of Braga were selected by the National Tourism Register, in the typology hotels and in the categories from 2 to 5 stars, which resulted in a selection of 28 hotels to contribute to the present study. In this first phase of the study, a survey was carried out on the hotels’ websites as well as social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter and the social media YouTube. In a first phase, an exhaustive survey of the digital presence of hotels was carried out. After that, a qualitative methodology was adopted, applying a descriptive analysis and semi-structured interviews to managers, owners and those responsible for marketing the hotels, in order to analyze the digital presence and understand how the management of the social media in which they are present is done.