Introduction

The emergence of social media has significantly influenced the development of marketing strategies in the hotel industry. Social media has changed how customers communicate, collaborate, and connect with others. Service organizations, such as hotels, need to constantly update their activities on social media because Web 2.0 transformed how customers developed relationships with brands (Gensler et al., 2013). One of the key challenges in social media marketing is customers can develop a relationship with different parties; thus, hotels need to pay attention to different types of relationships to promote customers’ interactions with the hotel brand and to enhance their responses toward the hotel brand. The popularity and growth of social media alert hotels to develop relationships with their customers, providing a place where customers can build relationships with the service, the hotel brand, and other customers.

Understanding different types of customers’ relationships could benefit hotels because each relationship attributes customers’ interactions with the hotel. Relationship marketing, which focuses on creating and maintaining long-term customer relationships, serves as a competitive advantage and strategic resource for the firm (Webster, 1992). Relationship marketing is related to services marketing because its emphasis is on the interactions between the customer and the service provider (Kinard and Capella, 2006). This relationship marketing aims to develop long-term, mutually satisfying relationships with customers, suppliers, and distributors by transforming an organization’s focus from fixed transactions to a long-term, ongoing, profitable relationship (Kotler, 2000).