This week and next I’ll be sharing the results from the ski resort social media marketing survey. I had originally planned to just do a couple posts, but man, there’s some really interesting stuff in here.

A fascinating week last week with results from Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. This week? Gonna start with YouTube. Once again, I’ll start by rolling through the results (with a touch of commentary) and then share each of your individual responses after that.

Effectiveness

Not the unanimous results of Twitter or, in many ways, Instgram, but not quite as divided as Facebook as only 20% said YouTube’s effectiveness had decreased for their resort over the last three years and 42% saying it had increased.

Value

I’ll talk about this more at the end, but I am happy to see that there’s a good balance between resorts using main the organic side (which is HUGE) and those using the ad platform. So often we forget that the difference between Facebook or Instgram or Twitter or anywhere else you can upload video is that YouTube is a search engine. It had distribution for your videos baked right in.

Free Response
The question was “In a sentence, where’s your head at with YOUTUBE right now?” which 39 people replied to. Here what they said:

It’s necessary… but should we be producing content for Vimeo too?

A great landing page and resource to house resort videos.

Not much value for us.

Ehhh

Youtube became less effective when Facebook Native videos grew in popularity.

Liking the slowly improving targeting to run 3:00, :60 and :30 in the PPV format, linked to special offers

Youtube is a great platform to host resort videos then embed these on other on our sites.

Hit or miss.

A content library for videos pushed elsewhere.

we are going to be doing more on YT – it is the #2 search engine

We have so much to show that people love to see!

do not use

We need to focus more.

We need to do more on YouTube – great place for short video ads, but they have to be high quality.

Video is huge and having the ability to showcase quality video is key. We currently lack the internal ability to produce those quality video assets and need to figure out a way to combat that in order to more effectively tell the story of the resort.

It’s vast – feels like trying to wrangle a 34′ tall wildebeest with a strand of dental floss.

Ready to learn more and take advantage of a tool that the youngest generations use as TV.

We took a nap as an organization on YT. WE are now back in it full intention.

Great way to distribute content

use as a tool to share content

Not essential

We had a low following before and it’s still a low following as we directly upload our videos to FB and insta to autoplay.

Video has become so much bigger and user friendly on every platform the YouTube is just another social site we post video to.

Still a great platform for hosting/sharing video content that we probably don’t utilize as well as we should.

Trying to up the frequency of which we add videos.

Got to be there.

We don’t have a great focus on it though the value is there for easily sharing content–it’s the time to put together that [good] content that seems to be hard to find.

The ski industry as a whole has yet to crack the code on YouTube, there’s a reason unboxings and vlogs get so many views.

Long format stuff is better for us

Slowing down

Most of our videos are posted on Facebook so we don’t use YouTube as often.

Other social channels are taking more priority, namely with Facebook algorithms helping enhance native video.
we dont use it enough to benefit from it – maybe this year !

YouTube was never overly effective for our resort but I think it is important to update – we mostly use it as a place to host videos, but we are consistent with updating content on the page and occasionally see an influx of comments.

YouTube ads is a step we’re desperately missing out on.

Official online/cloud video gallery for our website and apps.

We need to better utilize this tool

Gotta have it. It integrates with everything we do but doesn’t get us many eyeballs on its own.

YOUTUBE sucks

The vibe here is really, really interesting. And maybe it’s my own bias influencing what I see, but I see a lot of “we do a bit and host our videos there, but should probably do more.” I’ll revisit this one soon.

So that’s YouTube. Kind of a quick one today. Tomorrow? Snapchat and Pinterest.

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.