I recently read a headline that made me do a double take. See if you pick up on the same thing I did:

“Sales growth is the lowest it’s been in years.”

The article, meant to show the poor performance of a certain business, was ironic because even with lower growth, it’s still growth. It’s like saying, “my boss only gave me an 8% raise this year instead of 10% last year.”

A raise is a raise. Growth is growth.

So when we look at how growth of various social media metrics has changed from Dec 2011 to Dec 2012, keep that in mind:

First off, yes, growth is slower this year than last year, but 5-7% growth is still nothing to sneeze at. True, it’s not the double-digit monthly jumps of last season, but it’s still a bit more solid than I expected.

Especially whey you consider raw numbers. In this graph, keep in mind that I equalized the different metrics so 300 YouTube views would be similar in height to 1 YouTube subscriber. No overall scale here, except between the comparisons of each metric YOY so you can see the difference.

Right off the bat you notice that even though 4 of the 5 metrics had lower percentage growth, when you look at the raw increase in numbers, resorts are still gaining a few more fans each month than they did last year.

Percentage growth is down, raw growth is a bit up.

Remember
I think that’s important to remember. Yes, fan counts are maturing and percentage growth isn’t as high as it used to be, but your fan count is still going up at a pretty steady pace.

Should fan growth be a focus? Perhaps, but I think it should be a minor, indirect one (fan growth is often a biproduct of engagement, especially RTs and shares). We’ll talk more about that later, but just wanted to put the “lower growth” some resorts are seeing into perspective.

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.