Q: Are more older resort guests becoming active on social media this season vs. last?

photo of the author Gregg Blanchard

After updating our social media study a few weeks ago, we promised to dig a little deeper on some of these metrics and compare them to last year to see how things are changing. True to our word, this is the first such follow-up. This time around, we wanted to find out if the percentage of older resort guests who are active on social media is growing or shrinking. Here’s what we found.

The Goods
For this analysis, we took data from 17,000 surveys given to guests at 17 different resorts. As you may recall from the original results, each questionaire started out with a simple question: are you active on social media? We then grouped the answers to this question by the age of the respondents. For example, last year we found that about 75% of 21-25 year-olds said “yes” vs just 25% of those 66-70 years of age.

What we’ve done in this analysis is compared this year’s results to last years to find how the likelihood of various age groups being active on social media is changing. Take a look:

Let’s do some quick interpretation. First, it’s clear that more of your older guests are becoming active on social media. From ages 41-70, each group showed an increase in the percentage of skiers that said “yes” to that question. While most groups below age 40 didn’t change significantly, one group did: 21-25. Whether it’s a sign of social media fatigue in younger users or an anomaly in the data, time will tell.

What This Means
For resorts that are putting significant resources into social media, the fact that this older group of guests – the ones spending more and staying longer – this is good news. While the overall likelihood of these guests seeing your social content is still much lower than that of a 20 or 30-something, it’s certainly a positive trend.

Next Week, More Awesomeness
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