The adaptation of social media networks to increase sales in the UK hostels industry

Abstract

This paper investigates how the hostels industry in the United Kingdom can adopt social media network tools to increase their sales. Although much has been written about the hostels industry in the United Kingdom and social media networks themselves, there is lack of data on the successful application of social media networks in the hostels industry in the United Kingdom. Therefore, this paper examines how the successful link between the hostels industry in the United Kingdom and social media networks could be developed. For that reason, the aims of this paper are to analyse each factor such as: number of qualified leads, lead-to-conversion rate and customer retention and how they are linked to the number of customers, audience and customer engagement. Using the data collected from online surveys I analysed how the hostels industry needs to make use of the social media networking sites to generate sales. I applied social network analysis to explore how the number of qualified leads is related to the number of customers. Also, I applied the sales funnel model to identify social media users that increase the lead-to-conversion rate. Data were analysed with the application of the calculation of Pearsons chi-square to explore the impact of customer engagement in social media networks on customer retention. My results indicate that the hostels in the United Kingdom by the increasing the number of qualified leads, lead-to-conversion rate and customer retention with the social media networks application will increase the sales revenue of the company.

Keywords: social media networks, qualified leads, lead-to-conversion rate, customer retention, social networks analysis, sales funnel