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Merrigan, Nathan (2021) Social Media Marketing and its effectiveness among Irish SMEs in the hospitality Industry. Masters thesis, Dublin, National College of Ireland.
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Abstract
The purpose of this research paper is to understand how effective social media marketing is among Irish SMEs in the hospitality industry. There has been a deficit in recent literature when it comes to social media and its application towards the marketing efforts of these pubs, restaurants, and cafes from the Irish hospitality industry. This paper aims at providing an up to date and modernized study to fix this deficit. This study incorporates a thematic analysis methodology through the in-depth analysis of seven Irish SME’s. Of the seven Irish SMEs used two of them were cafes, one was a restaurant and the remaining four were pubs. All of these participants were located in the west Dublin region. Both cafes were relatively new only opening in the past two years while the Pubs and the Restaurant were long standing establishments. This allowed for a mixture of data to be collected both from all establishments where social media was used in a variety of different ways for their marketing purposes. This paper will be beneficial to the hospitality industry as it will highlight just how effective social media can be when it comes to the industry’s marketing efforts. Not only will it show what platform is preferred by the industry, but it will highlight the various uses of social media marketing for the industry.
Design/Methodology:
This research paper incorporated a qualitative approach through the use of in-depth interviews with a total of seven participants in the Irish hospitality industry. These participants were chosen through direct sampling as it was a flexible method to attract the most appropriate participants required for this study. Each participant interviewed was asked twelve distinct questions relevant to the use of social media in their business to help form themes which were identified using a thematic analysis.
Findings:
This paper helped identify the full effectiveness of social media marketing among Irish SMEs in the hospitality industry. Four themes were identified from the data collected through the course of the interviews which also helped prove five separate hypothesis that were created during the development of the main research question of this paper. The findings in this study have assisted in demonstrating where the hospitality industry is now in terms of marketing efforts as well as where it is headed in the future.
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