Q: When it comes to RFM, who are your resort’s Twitter followers…really?

Last week we showed off some of our new social CRM capabilities at Destination Summit. With more eyes seeing this data, a new list of Stash topics was quickly generated. This week, we’re taking an item from that list and again asking ourselves “who are these social media followers” by analyzing the RFM scores of resort Twitter followers. Pretty interesting stuff.

The Goods
We used a sample of more than 200,000 guests from 10 U.S. resorts for this analysis. As a quick refresher, RFM stands for recency, frequency, and monetary and is a combination of three, 1-5 scores on each of those areas to determine the value and loyalty of a customer. So, excluded from this sample are leads or Twitter followers who don’t have transactions in the database.

To provide context, we’ve included the RFM scores of guests who aren’t following that resort on Twitter. This includes all other guests in the database whether they are active on social media or never tweeted in their life. Here’s how the distribution of scores breaks down:

As expected, the RFM curve for the majority of guests followed the bell curve we’d expect from RFM. What’s interesting is the curve for Twitter followers. Rather than a bell, the graph sits slightly below the other before turning decidedly upwards after passing 13 on the scale. In other words, a Twitter follower with transactions in your database is more likely to have a high RFM score than other guests.

What This Means
Since social media burst on the scene, there has always been a classic “chicken and the egg” scenario at the center of the measurement and ROI debate. Is any measured loyalty among social media followers due to a resort’s social marketing or is it the loyal guests that are more likely to be following resorts on those channels?

Because many RFM scores include large numbers of transactions from before the social media marketing era, the data above seem to suggest that loyalty among social media followers may be a preexisting condition. It’s not to say that social media can’t generate loyalty, but it does appear that social media has given already-loyal guests another outlet to be involved with a brand they love.

Next Week, Next Stash
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