Trends How many hotels have jumped on the Pokemon GO bandwagon?

In a matter of days Pokemon GO has gone from zero to marketing hero for many small businesses eager to capitalize on the crowds the app has mobilized. But what about resorts and hotels? Are they getting in on the Poke-action as well? Here’s what we found.

The Goods
To find our answer we looked for mentions of Pokemon or elements within the game (PokeStops, Gyms, etc.) in the social media posts of 5,000 resort and hotel Twitter accounts. We counted what percentage of properties on each channel mentioned Pokemon at least once on any given day and plotted the results. For example, if 2,000 hotels tweeted and 20 mentioned Pokemon on Monday, that would be 1% on the chart below.

Overall, 9.2% of all hotels we looked at mentioned Pokemon at least once during this stretch with 1.2% of all tweets containing a reference to the game. Mentions first showed up Wednesday, July 6th before peaking exactly one week later on July 13th when 5.0% of all hotels mentioned Pokemon at least once. Since then references to Pokemon have steadily declined to just 1.9% on Sunday, July 17th.

What This Means
The first weekend in our sample (July 9-10) showed a slight dip, so the downward trend we saw on July 17 may be exaggerated, but looking at early numbers for this week don’t indicate any sort of rebound. In other words, it appears we’ve passed peak Pokemon.

To see how quickly the trend came and went is a fascinating visualization of viral topics and ideas. In the space of just one week we saw both the first mention from a hotel as well as the busiest day for mentions. Now that it’s beginning to fade the question becomes, what’s next?

The Goods
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