The Potential of Social Media Marketing Moments in The Hospitality Industry. Photos, Stories and Presentations on Instagram: A Case Study of Living Hotels

Social media plays a particularly important role in the tourism industry as travellers often share their experiences in social networks, post pictures or write blog articles. Tourism is one of the sectors most affected by digitisation and social networks (Istudor and Ana, 2019, p. 87). Rieppel (2019) states that Instagram has become indispensable as a communication tool for the hotel industry, thus the design elements and atmosphere in hotels exhibit at best a high “Instagram suitability”. This chapter deals with the aspects in the hotel industry that make for good content on Instagram. The intention was to investigate what kind of content a hotel should post to generate likes and to make their social media presence on Instagram a positive one. Furthermore, it looks at Living Hotels as a case study and deals with the question of how a hotel chain can build more reach on Instagram. To fulfil the research objectives, a theoretical foundation was developed which deals with the aspects and types of content on Instagram. Subsequently, a semiotic image analysis was performed. Furthermore, the Instagram content of Living Hotels has been analysed and compared with the results of the previous analysis of best practice. The study concludes that it is particularly important to emotionally engage viewers of images on Instagram, which is achieved by implementing strong storytelling, using a lot of user-generated content and implementing a special staging. The analysis indicates that Living Hotels as well as other hotels do not yet make full use of these aspects. Thus this chapter will provide recommendations on how to improve social media presence for future online endeavours.