Last week I posted a list over on Ryan Solutions that ranked the top 25 most popular social media management tools by hotels and resorts. Of all tools out there (as illustrated by the TrustRadius graphic above), I was surprised by how many showed up in the list.

But the readership over there demands slightly more broad analyses than years past, so I wanted to take a minute here and look just at the ski resort data within that set and highlight a few really interesting things I noticed.

#1) Twitter Web/Mobile Clients
Of the 4,900 hotels and resorts i looked at, 37% had posted a tweet directly from the twitter.com website within the last year. For ski resorts, that number was almost double at 70%.

Takeaway: For whatever reason, ski resorts are much, much more likely to post directly from native apps/sites than other hospitality brands.

#2) Top 10
Outside of the native apps, the top 10 tools ski resorts did use were:

What you’ll quickly notice is that, a), two of the Top 5 are email platforms that have broadened their feature set to allow autoposting (or basic management) from their tool.

But the other thing is that even though 70% of ski areas use the web client, 24% have used Hootsuite compared to just 14.4% of the broader hospitality group.

#3) Tools per Resort
Even more, if you look at how many different tools the average hospitality brand uses that number comes out to around 1.5.

But if you look at how many different sources ski resort tweets comes from, that number is 3.5. In other words, the average ski resort is much more likely to post content from different sources than a generic hotel or resort in another vertical.

#4) YOY Changes
What’s even more interesting is that in 2014/15, that number was 4.3. And those tweets came from 98 different tools. In 2015/16, ski resorts used 83 different tools to post tweets.

So resorts are posting from fewer sources individually, but fewer sources overall as well.

#5) Mobile, Mobile Mobile
But perhaps the thing that stood out the most was the likelihood of ski resort content being posted from mobile. Almost 56% of ski resorts posted something from the Twitter iPhone app and 19% posted from the Android version. Another 7% posted from Twitter mobile website.

For general hospitality those numbers were 21%, 5%, and 2% respectively.

Quick Recap
So, what have we learned. A few things.

First, ski resorts are much more likely to be using multiple tools and platforms to share content on social media. It’s not just 3rd party tools and it’s not just the native apps. It’s not just desktop and it’s not just mobile. It’s all of those things in various combinatoins.

Second, those numbers seem to be dropping YOY but are still very high. Resorts are toggling less but still toggle much more than other hospitality brands by a huge margin.

Given the nature of ski, much of this is to be expected. But seeing the specifics behind our expectations is an interesting lesson in ski vs everyone else.

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.