The correlation between hotel star ratings and Facebook page dynamics is something that's been analyzed 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.

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.

hotel fan count vs star rating

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.