Trends Q: How frequently are resorts posting on Facebook this year compared to previous years?

Social media is slowly beginning to mature as a marketing medium. Brand fan pages on Facebook, for example, didn’t even launch until 2007. As more and more resorts have begun to leverage this channel through the years, we wanted to take a look at how resorts’ posting frequency has increased. Are resorts posting more now than they did last year or the year before that? See what we found.

The Goods
We took 325,000 Facebook posts from over 400 North American resorts since late 2008. We grouped them by date and found the average number of updates a resort posted during each month.

What’s not very hard to notice is that resorts post much more frequently in winter than they do in summer. On average, there are roughly twice as many winter updates per resort than a typical summer month. Winter hasn’t quite been as consistent. After peaking at 55 monthly updates / resort in January of 2012, the 12/13 peak was 44 which is a little closer to the original curve.

What This Means
The big question we ask from the chart is this: why the massive spike in posts during snowless 2011/12? If some of the best content is snow-related, why would a year with little snow see so many posts? Did the prominence of Instagram and other, newer networks divert efforts away from Facebook or were marketers overcompensating?

Whatever the case, we’d expect that growth to slow significantly, or event drop slightly in some cases, during the next few years. It will continue to grow as a channel, but like happened with the steep growth in email volume a decade ago, marketers will likely focus their efforts a bit more.

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