Trends The Stash: Resort social media growth is down…but it isn’t.

Every year we’ve updated a simple metric: resort social media growth. We’ve been tracking this stat since 2010 to find out what happens to growth as these networks get older. Are fans flocking as quickly as new users? Are the numbers looking flat? Or is growth slowly shrinking? Here’s our latest update.

The Goods
To find our answer we’ve used the same methodology as previous years (view analysis of 2012, 2013, and 2014): the top 38 mountain resorts from June 18 – July 18. As usual, we started with growth as a percentage of total fans/followers:

For the fifth straight year, average monthly resort growth on Twitter was down, dropping from 0.74% in 2014 to 0.66% in 2015. Facebook was also down for the fourth time in five years, dropping from 0.96% in 2014 to 0.65% in 2015. But what about the raw increase in fans over that month? Take a look.

Looking at growth as total instead of a percentage, resorts on Twitter saw their second highest growth ever. Resorts on Facebook saw a slight drop versus 2013 and 2014, but still higher than 2010-2012.

What This Means
So is growth down? Yes. But is it also flat? Yeah. As always, it depends on how you look at it. To be honest, though, we’re surprised the trend that started when social was gaining new users at off-the-chart rates has continued through 2015.

Will percentage growth be down next year? Almost surely, which is to be expected as every new fan increases the denominator of that equation. But will total gains stay flat? We thought we’d say “no” this year and were wrong. Only time will tell if next year will change this trend.

Next Week: More Insights
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