Are top travel “influencers” all influencing the exact same people?

Working with travel influencers has become a powerful strategy to help destinations reach new eyes through authentic, trusted voices. But how much crossover is there between those voices? If you work with three influencers with 100,000 followers each, are you reaching 300,000 unique travelers or the same 100,000 three times? Here’s what we found.

The Goods
To find our answer we analyzed the Twitter accounts of ten top travel influencers who each had about 100,000 followers. We then divided unique followers by total followers to find the unique reach rate for different sized groups of influencers. For example, if we were looking at two influencers with a combined 100,000 total followers and 75,000 of those were unique, the unique reach would be 75% of total reach.

NOTE: The influencers included in this analysis (follower counts in parenthesis) were @TheRebelChick (80k), @JohnnyJet (84k), @LandLopers (89k), @ThePlanetD (119k), @NomadicMatt (98k), @TammiLeeTips (109k), @MappingMegan (96k), @TrueNomads (92k), @MalloryonTravel (88k), and @Elliottdotorg (125k).

When looking at any combination of two influencers, the average unique reach percentage was 91.8%. When looking at any combination of three influencers, the average percentage was 85.7%. That number was 77.1% when looking at groups of five influencers. Of the 982,000 total followers across all ten of the influencers we looked at, 636,000 were unique (64.8%).

What This Means
What’s interesting is that even when you compare the two accounts with the most crossover – @MappingMegan and @TrueNomads – the unique reach is still 78% of total reach. Looking at the three with the most crossover – @MalloryonTravel, @LandLopers, and @ThePlanetD – not only do you get different influencers, unique reach is still 70%.

So is there crossover? Yes. But assuming this trend holds true on Facebook, Instagram and other networks, there’s not as much as we expected. Instead, it appears that each of these travel influencers has an audience that is both large and captive, but also unique to them.

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