If a resort posts a photo to four social networks, where will it get the most engagement?

Across all major social networks, one content type is almost universally supported: photos. But do resort photos get more engagement when they are posted to one site versus another? It’s a simple question with interesting implications. Here’s what we found.

The Goods
To find our answer we looked at 225,000 photos posted by ski, golf, and beach resorts to four social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Google+) during the last year. As each site has some form of “like” (like, +1, favorite, etc.), we compared average like rates (“likes / fans” at time of posting) for each network and plotted them below.

Instagram is the clear winner with resort photos averaging a like rate of 6.3%. Facebook comes in second with a like rate of 0.6% with Google+ in third (0.2% +1 rate) and Twitter coming in last (0.07% favorite rate).

What This Means
Whatever the reason(s) – photo-focused platform, user demographic/culture, interface design, etc. – Instagram dominates photo engagement on social media. Compared to photos posted on Twitter, resort photos on Instagram see nearly 100x as many likes.

And don’t be fooled by the scale, setting Instagram aside we still see large gaps between the remaining networks. Facebook, with their algorithm that favors visual content like photos and natively-uploaded videos, sees nearly 10x as many likes as Twitter. Google+ is closer, but still sees 3x as many likes on photos posted to their service.

Keep On Comin’
Last Tuesday we posted a resort marketing insight like this one and next Tuesday we’ll post another. It’s a weekly tradition we call The Stash. Don’t want to miss the next round? Stick your email below.