The one content type that’s slowly dominating hospitality marketing on Facebook.

We’ve shared a handful of macro-level insights into how resorts and hotels use social media, but an interesting angle came up after last week’s analysis of snow vs foliage engagement at winter resorts. Simply put, which content type – photos, videos, or other – is most shared on Facebook by hospitality marketers? Here’s what we found.

The Goods
To find our answer we took a sample of 700,000 Facebook posts shared by 500 hotels and resorts over the last six years. We found what percentage were photos, videos, and other (anything but photos or videos) each month and plotted the results below.

Early in 2010 the posts shared by our sample were 14% photos, 3% videos, and 83% other. Over the last couple months the breakdown has shifted significantly in favor of visuals with 62% photos, 7% videos, and 31% other.

What This Means
Between the ease of creation and the engagement they receive, photos have come to dominate brand messaging on Facebook by a factor of 2:1 over non-visual content. But where we are most intrigued is the growth of video.

After starting with a small share in 2010, video made up less than 1% of all posts during a nearly two-year stretch from December 2011 until August 2013. Today, partly due to how Facebook favors direct video uploads in their algorithm and other such efforts to motivate video sharing, that slice is more than 8 times the size it was.

Next Week, More Insights
We’ve been publishing new hospitality-specific insights with hospitality-specific data every Tuesday since 2012. We call it Tuesday Trends. Stick your email below and we’ll let you know when the next post drops.