I am such a nerd.

Instead of starting my weekend like a normal person, I spent the first hour after arriving home on Friday grabbing some numbers I had been guessing at but had never completely nailed down. The question was sparked by a tweet from Aspen’s Christian Knapp: how many unique followers did the Mountain Collective resorts have?

So, I spent that Friday evening pulling the user IDs of the nearly 1,000,000 resort Twitter followers to analyze overlap. Here are 5, interesting things that I learned.

Nerdy Finding #1
48.7% of North American Resort Twitter Followers are Unique
The first thing I wanted to find was, overall, the total number of unique followers of North American resorts. Now, on the day I pulled these stats, there were 981,118 total resort Twitter followers. Exactly 477,884 of those were unique. Which also means the average resort Twitter follower for any given resort follows at least one other mountain’s profile.

Nerdy Finding #2
Mountain Collective Resorts Have 75.4% Unique Followers
Now, my database is only resorts, so this doesn’t include Liftopia, but when I pulled the numbers the Mountain Collective resorts had 106,244 unique of 140,923 total Followers. I had guessed 20% overlap, so I was a little bit low.

Nerdy Finding #3
15% of Followers Follow 3 or More Resorts
Next, I decided to look at how many of these dudes and dudettes followed multiple resorts. From the sample, 70,929 of those 477,884 followers were following at least 3 resorts on Twitter. That number is 6.4% for 5 or more.

Nerdy Finding #4
62.3% of Michigan Resort Followers are Unique
My next question was about individual followers on a state level. For Michigan, that number was 62.3%, for New York, that number was 81.7%, and for California it was 59.0%.

Nerdy Finding #5
78.5% of Squaw Valley / Alpine Meadows Followers are Unique
I also wanted to look at how many followers would be unique when comparing two resorts that were close by distance, ownership, or interest. I started with Alpine Meadows and Squaw Valley. Of their 17,691 combined followers, 13,887 (78.5%) were unique. For Park City Mountain Resort and Canyons Resort, the uniques went up to 86.3%. For Attitash and Wildcat, it was 76.4%.

And, for kicks and giggles to see if skier only folk were congregating, I looked at Alta, Deer Valley, and Mad River Glen. Of their combined followers, 89.7% were unique.

So there you have it, some random facts about ski resort Twitter followers from a nerdy Friday evening last week.

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.