I’ve been watching some numbers this morning.

Last week Solitude posted this photo to their Instagram account with ~19,600 followers.

The snow is really starting to stack up at @SkiSolitude. Opening day is Friday! Come #FindSolitude. | BigCottonwoodCanyon #SaltLakeCity #Utah #Ski #Skiing #Snowboard #snowboarding #skicity #skiutah #spreadstoke #snow #winter #winterishere

A photo posted by Solitude Mountain Resort (@skisolitude) on Nov 28, 2016 at 8:56am PST

Within a few seconds IFTTT had pushed it to their Twitter account with ~14,300 followers.

The ❄️snow❄️ is really starting to stack up at @SkiSolitude. Opening day is Friday! Come #FindSolitude. | BigCotton… pic.twitter.com/EbTN0u9qmD

— Solitude Mtn Resort (@SkiSolitude) November 28, 2016

Right off the bat I noticed that the tweet was getting a ton more engagement than tweets usually do. Already it’s one of the most engaging tweets Solitude has ever seen. So I asked myself:

“How does the engagement of an outlier tweet compare to that of a typical Intsgram photo?”

Without sharing a fairly uneventful hour-by-hour comparison of engagement, let me share what I saw immediately after the photo was posted at around 10:00am MT on Monday, Nov 28 and what I’m seeing now about six hours later.

10:00am

• Twitter: 7 likes
• Instagram: 101 likes

4:00pm

• Twitter: 70 likes
• Instagram: 1,355 likes

You’ll likely see the totals now in those embedded media above, but notice that even with this tweet that saw incredible amounts of engagement, the Instagram version of the exact same content (shared with about 1.3x as many followers) saw nearly 20x as many likes.

More Data
About 18 months ago I did an analysis on Tuesday Trends about the engagement of photos across four social platforms.

Here’s the chart.

Here are the actual average like rates (likes/followers) from the analysis:

• Facebook: 0.6%
• Twitter: 0.07%
• Instagram: 6.3%
• Google: 0.2%

Do the math, the Instagram like rate is nearly 100x that on Twitter.

Instagram-First Strategy
I think sometimes we think of Instagram as either #2 (behind Facebook) or #3 (behind Twitter), but with the visual nature of our industry I’ve started to see valid reasons why it should be #1.

And by #1 I mean that if your ski area only has time for one network, you should consider Instagram to be that one. If you’re going to put extra effort into one channel, Instagram may be the most deserving of that time. If you’re going to dig a little deeper into one source of analytics, it might be Instagram’s.

Facebook has the powerful share button that’s tough to beat, but even with that, the numbers are tough to ignore.

About Gregg & SlopeFillers
I've had more first-time visitors lately, so adding a quick "about" section. I started SlopeFillers in 2010 with the simple goal of sharing great resort marketing strategies. Today I run marketing for resort ecommerce and CRM provider Inntopia, my home mountain is the lovely Nordic Valley, and my favorite marketing campaign remains the Ski Utah TV show that sold me on skiing as a kid in the 90s.