Q: For every 100 Twitter followers a resort gains, how many do they lose?

While we often think that increases in fan and follower counts tell the whole story, they really are a representation of net new followers because they miss a critical group: the people who unfollow you. Now, thanks to some sassy new social media functionality we’ve been building into our databases (yep, we know who your guests are on Twitter, Facebook, etc., talk to your account manager for the scoop), we can find an answer. Take a gander.

The Goods
For this analysis we took the last three months of follows and unfollows for the Twitter accounts of 17 mountain resorts. These resorts had an average of just under 6,000 followers each.

Every day these resorts averaged 11.25 new follows, 3.94 unfollows, for a net increase of 7.31 new followers per day. Or as we queried in the title of this post, for every 100 people that followed these resorts’ Twitter accounts, about 35 unfollowed.

What This Means
The number of people that unfollow resort Twitter accounts each day was a little surprising. At the same time, however, we couldn’t help but think there may be a big opportunity in these numbers for social media managers.

It’s a case of growing vs. mitigating loss: if a marketer can identify spikes in unfollows, they may be able to pinpoint post types that are canceling out their efforts. Rather than push for new follows, decreasing unfollows may be an easier path to increased growth. And will unfollow rates jump as relevance wanes during warmer months? Stay tuned.

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