Social Media Marketing Acceptability Among Restaurants On Customers Relationship In Katsina State, Nigeria

ABSTRACT

Social Media has become a good marketing and quality management tool for restaurants and other hospitality sectors. Restaurants continue to be a difficult place for entrepreneurs to explore business opportunities, but by understanding common challenges, owners may be able to develop unique strategies to increase their chances of success on maintaining customer relationship. The major aim of the study was to identify how acceptable social media is in creating restaurant employees and customers’ relationship. The state is made up of three zones namely; Katsina, Funtua and Daura zones. Social media become an important source of information for restaurants and its platforms that smooth the progress of sharing information have been developed. Psychological ownership and social penetration theories of relationship were reviewed in the study to see how relationship developed from non-intimate to intimate. Cross-sectional descriptive survey was adopted in conducting the study and quantitative and qualitative data were collected from both primary and secondary sources. The study targeted 2907 staff and guests of these restaurants in the study area. From the 98 total registered restaurants in the study area, systematic sampling was adopted in sampling 49 restaurants from the three zones in the study area from which sample size was selected. The staffs from the selected restaurants were segregated into operational and managerial categories using cluster sampling method. Purposive sampling was used in sampling the managerial staff while simple random sampling was used on operational staff. From the study population confidence interval approach formula for sample size was adopted to select 481 respondents as the sample size. Two questionnaires were used as instrument for the study, one for operational staff and the other for guest. Pre-test of the instrument was done to avoid any ambiguous and bias questions. The questionnaire which is self analytical likert scale type questions were personally administered to respondents and responses collected were used for the quantitative analysis while qualitative data was collected from the results of the interview conducted with the managerial staff and used for the analysis. The data collected was analyzed in SPSS 21, using descriptive statistics, inferential and regression analysis and Chi-square was used for testing the hypothesis. The research found that there was positive correlation between social media marketing acceptability and restaurant customers’ relationship which was statistically significant (p< 0.05). Findings also indicated that both staff and guests of the restaurants rated social media marketing acceptability highly acceptable. The most important social media marketing factors were ‘frequency of usage,’ ‘tools in use,’ and ‘social-interactive engagement.’ Exploring the social media marketing predictor variables of customers’ relationship, this research revealed that ‘frequency of usage’ and ‘creators’ is ranked among the high predictors of customer relationship followed by ‘tools in use’ and ‘social media consumption.’ Overall, it was concluded that both staff and guests of the restaurants regards effective and efficient social media sites as the leading factor of their acceptance of social media as a marketing tool. It was reiterated that satisfied staff and guests posed positive perception about social media marketing acceptability, while dissatisfied ones developed negative perception and disregard social media as a good marketing tool.