Q: How many of your social media fans were destination guests in 2011/12?

For this week’s Stash we set out to answer one, simple question – how many of your social media fans and followers were destination guests in 2011/12? More than just male vs. female, not old vs. young, we want to know who these fans are offline and, more importantly, on the balance sheet. Slowly, we hope to find a good answer to this question. This is the first step.

The Goods
To begin, we took a sample of 10 resorts, each with at least 2,000 lodging reservations during the 2011/12 season. From there, we gathered the social media survey responses from these guests, found the percentage of those that followed that resort on Facebook or Twitter and used the survey response rate to work backward to find an estimate of total guests who were also fans or followers.

We then took the average number of Facebook fans each resort had during the season and divided it by the total fans/follower guests to get the answer to our question. Here’s what we found.

Some resorts saw as many as 16.3% of their Facebook fans or 8.7% of their Twitter followers visit their resort last season. Others were well below 5% on both accounts, but here’s how the averages came out.

The graph is scaled to see the detail, but on average, resorts saw 6.2% of their Facebook fans and 4.20% of their Twitter followers book lodging at their resort last season.

What This Means
First, let remember that we don’t know what role, if any, social media played in their decisions. Only 7.3% of these fans’ vacation decisions are being influenced by social media, but determining whether social is playing a critical role in the process is still an riddle to solve.

However, what we do know is that many of your fans ARE destination guests. They are spending money at your resort and do have a chance to see your messages, photos, and videos. In other words, some of your most valuable customers are reading your tweets. On the other hand, over 90% of your followers AREN’T destination guests. The next step for both us and you, is to figure out who those people are.