Q: How many fans/followers should your ski resort social accounts have in 2014?

photo of the author Gregg Blanchard

A couple years ago we used skier visits to find an average ratio between those visits and social media follower counts for ski resorts. Now, in 2014, we decided to revisit this analysis to see how these ratios have changed and try to answer, once again, about how many fans your ski resort should have. Here’s how it looked.

The Goods
For this analysis we used crowdsourced skier visit data and historical social media stats from SlopeFillers to provide a more complete picture of not just the numbers today, but how these ratios have changed over time. For the core analysis we focused on the same pair of Facebook and Twitter as the previous round. The ratio is “skier visits” / “fans” so if you have 500,000 skier visits and 50,000 fans, the ratio would be 10:1.

To get specific, the Facebook ratio today is about 15:1. So if you have 500,000 skier visits, the averages say you should have about 33,000 fans. That ratio is down from 20:1 in 2013 and 32:1 in 2012. Twitter’s ratio is 83:1 today. So, with the same 500,000 skier visits, the averages would suggest about 6,000 followers.

Not listed were Instagram (235:1 today, 362:1 in 2013) and Google (1,564:1 today, 2,181:1 in 2013).

What This Means
First, keep in mind that a downward trend indicates overall growth. In this case, less is more. When we looked at these numbers in 2012, the big takeaway was a reminder that those numbers would change. And change they did. We kept skier visits constant, but as we look at the last two years we start to see a trend that begins to resemble a plateau.

We’ll be looking at YOY fan/follower growth here in a few weeks and we’ll try to update these stats next year, but there are many indications that these 2014 ratios could serve as a solid rule of thumb for the next couple seasons.

Don’t Miss a Beat
we’ll publish another resort marketing insight like this one next week. Don’t want to miss it? Stick your email below and we’ll send you a quick alert when it’s ready.