Trends The Stash: Do 5-star hotels get more Facebook engagement than 3-star?

We’ve looked at the correlation between hotel star ratings and Facebook page dynamics before, but this time we’re looking at a question that comes up more than any other: engagement. Is there any correlation between the star-rating of a hotel and the average engagement it sees on Facebook? Here’s what we found.

The Goods
To find our answer we looked at over 7,000 hotel Facebook pages and tracked their “people talking about this” percentage (PTAT/fans) over the last three months. We then grouped their averages by star rating and plotted them on the chart below.

Engagement peaked for 3.0-star hotels at 5.5% but fell above and below that point to a low of 3.6% for 2.5-star hotels and 4.5% for 5.0-star hotels. But remember the vast difference is fan counts between these profiles.

In other words, larger hotels have a much larger fan base to try to engage.

What This Means
We’ve seen before that smaller fan bases tend to have higher engagement. In the case of hotels, however, as fans growth increases so does the presumed quality of the lodging product and marketing content that goes along with it.

Even still, the quality on both counts appears to not quite be enough to overcome the challenge of activating that longer list of fans. As far as we can tell, 3-star hotels seem to have the right combination of community size and content/product quality to claim the highest point in this analysis.

More, More, More
We’ll be back next week with another hotel and resort marketing insight like this one. Over the last three years we’ve covered everything from hospitality email marketing insights to OTA share at mountain destinations. Stick your email below and we’ll ping you when the next one drops.