Last year, Ryan Solutions partnered with Guest Research, Inc. to put together a first-of-its-kind social media survey for skiers at resorts all over the country.

The takeaways were pretty straightforward:

• About half of skiers are active on social media.
• That half is skewed toward the younger crowd.
• About half of that group follows the resort on Facebook or Twitter
• And about 10% of the socially active group said social media influenced their decision to visit.

Now, with an new season of data, we were able to run some comparisons. The gist there is that more skiers are active on social media but fewer are following resorts exclusively on Facebook.

I’d highly recommend taking a look at the full update, but let’s quickly dig deeper on the last area the research covered: influence.

The Question
If I were to ride the lift with you and ask, “of all the skiers on the mountain, what percentage, when they made their decision to come, were influenced to do so by social media?” What would you say?

Maybe 20%? Perhaps 25%?

The answer is actually 5%. While that may sound low, keep in mind that only about 25% of guests are following you on social media in the first place. So, of the folks that could potentially be reached by your posts, somewhere around 1 in 5 recognize that a resort’s content impacted their decision making process.

The Missing Pieces
Now, let’s keep this in perspective. What we don’t know is how important the influence of social media is. How many of those people would have come even if they hadn’t seen your posts? How many wouldn’t have?

Measuring how a channel assists a conversion can be tricky.

We also don’t know what content is doing the influencing. Is it a deal you share or the imagery of a powder day that did the trick? Was it someone you interacted with one-on-one, or a bystander simply watching the feed but rarely engaging?

The Lesson
To me, this says that social media is doing a pretty good job of influencing decisions. We don’t know how much, but we know it’s happening.

The one big takeaway I see is similar to last year’s data: put social media in perspective.

Most of your skiers are not going to see these messages so don’t assume it’s an all encompassing channel. Also recognize the value of assisting 5% of transactions and allocate resources accordingly. Social is a great tool, but be smart of the effort you put into it.

For the full details on the data and the most recent update, here’s the full post:
http://www.ryansolutions.com/blog/2013/ski-resort-social-media-study-february-2013-update/

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.