Umair Tahir

Thesis (M.A.) from the year 2014 in the subject Business economics - Marketing, Corporate Communication, CRM, Market Research, Social Media, grade: 3.7, Lovely Professional University, Punjab (IBIT), course: marketing, language: English, abstract: Social networking has become a vital component of the current era which is not only being utilized by the public but also the corporate sector is using it for marketing purposes. The success of social web as a marketing tool is because of its enormous usage and it bears minimum cost to the firms. Over the past few decades the use of personal computers and laptops has increased dramatically. Moreover the use of Internet and the social websites is progressing among the users. Different business companies are taking the advantage of this trend and are using social network as a vehicle to reach millions of their customers and repeat buyers. For industry such as hospitality industry where it is extremely important to stay in touch with customers constantly and provide them latest updates regarding the services, social networking sites are being considered one of the most effective and efficient tool. However the corporate firms are not utilizing this platform to its maximum level and there is still lot more potential that has to explored and understood. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effect of the customer/user generated advertisement on the hospitality industry and analyze the different marketing strategies being implemented by the organizations to reach masses of their customers. The paper will explain the factors influencing the consumer's purchase intention and brand loyalty. The objective of the research paper is not only to calculate the number of hospitality firms using the social network actively but analyze the different sectors and functions of the social media being implemented by the industry for advertisement. The research paper also explains the advantage of using the social networking sites for advertisement as compared to the traditional advertising. The study will reveal which consumers are our most profitable segment which we need to go for. The study will explain the factors which are considered most important by consumers and hence the industry should focus its marketing efforts on these factors.