With the worldwide increased usage of social media, organisations are experiencing great pressure to implement social media into their existing marketing strategies. Due to this development, social media has rapidly become an important marketing tool. The study focuses on social media marketing implementation, with the aim to develop an increased understanding of the challenges concerning how hotels adapt social media into their marketing activities by investigating social media marketing usage in hotels. The result suggests that most hotels are reactive in their social media usage and do not actively seek interaction, and that individual knowledge needs to be spread throughout organisations to a greater extent in order to achieve interaction with customers in social media channels.

Social media has changed how both individuals and organizations communicate and interact online. It is argued that social media has had major effects on the hospitality and tourism industry, changing how organizations market themselves, provide service and create relationships with customers. Over- all, there is little empirical evidence on how and why organizations use social media. Existing re- search is rather fragmented, focusing on specific social media use such as marketing or internal communication. More research with a holistic view on social media usage is therefore needed. The present study investigates how 14 hotel organizations in seven European countries within an international hotel chain use social media and what effects the use has on the organizations. The result shows that the hotels use social media for both internal and external communication. However, there is a large focus on managing User-Generated Content

Social media refers to online tools that make it possible for users to create content, publish, share and communicate online. Social media use by and in organizations is a developing research field still in its infancy. The present paper presents a literature reviewon the subject of Organizational Social Media (OSM), starting and proceeding from van Osch and Coursaris's literature review extending to 2011. There view contributes to the IS research field by describing how the IS research field defines and categorizes social media, identifying what topics are currently interesting and suggesting future researchtopics. The findings suggest that to a great extent the IS research field focuses on internal activities e.g.communication and knowledge sharing made possible by social media and that a common definition of social media is lacking

Social media have transformed the hospitality and tourism industry and affected how customers interact and take decisions, but have also affected organisations’ business strategies and processes. Prior research has shown that a key understanding of IT implementation in organisations is how individuals adopt, use and make sense of technologies. Despite the increased use of social media in hotel organisations there is a research gap and little is known about how individuals’ sense-making affects organisational use over time. The aim of the present study is to contribute to the research field by using Orlikowski and Gash’s (ACM Trans Inf Syst 12(2):174–207, 1994) framework of Technological Frames. The interpretative case study follows social media use in 14 hotel organisations within an international hotel chain in seven European countries over four years. The study finds incongruence and lack of dominant frames and discusses the related organisational implications.