Trends Q: How fast are resort social follower counts growing in 2014 vs previous years?

It’s July which means it’s time to update our YOY social media growth stats for ski resorts as we’ve done in 2012 and 2013. Now with five years of social data to draw from, we again ask the question: Is social growth slowing down, continuing upward, or not changing at all? Take a look.

The Goods
As we’ve done in the past for this analysis, we used the top 38 ski resorts on both Twitter and Facebook for our sample. And to remove fluctuations from snow and weather, we’ve used a summer period – June 18, 2014 to July 18, 2014 – for our growth comparison. The first chart represents average percentage growth for these resorts while the second charts indicates the average net increase in fans and followers.

On the percentage growth side, Twitter continued a steady decline while Facebook dropped but only to a point nearly equal to that of 2012. On the raw increase side, Twitter showed a slight drop but remained similar to 2012 and 2011 while Facebook remained fairly high relative to all other years in the analysis.

What This Means
While the number of new fans as a percentage of total fans continues to slide, it was a bit surprising to see that new fans overall seems to be holding somewhat steady. Perhaps that’s an indication of a increase in spend on fan/follower acquisition.

Either way, the fact that social users continue to like and follow resort accounts at a pace similar to that of the last few years is a positive sign for these channels going forward. Each year we expect to see something in regard to social growth, but perhaps the channel maturity found in the lack thereof is going to be the big lesson in the end.

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