Yet Another Thing That Surprised Me About Facebook and Twitter Fan Growth
Gregg Blanchard /
This post is like a play in three acts.
Act 1 – The Stat
So, a few months ago I shared something that has always surprised me lately when I look at industry fan and follow growth.
Over a year across two different platforms, with a 5x difference in total fans, with entirely different content publishing abilities, Facebook and Twitter were nearly identical when it came to one-year growth:
- Facebook: 48.95%
- Twitter: 48.12%
That blew my mind. Though, it must be said, that my mind is easily blown these days.
Act 2 – The Trend
This realization sent my mind back to last year when I published a Stash about YOY growth trends for the top resorts on both Facebook and Twitter.
The gist was that percentage growth had consistently slowed each year, but the actual increase in new fans had dropped slightly in 2012.
Act 3 – The New Data
So, wanting to see where we stand today, I revisited that analysis with 2013 data and here’s what I found.
Percentage growth had pretty much stalled, but June-July 2013 showed the biggest total increase in fans and followers of any of the last four years.
Twitter by a little, Facebook by a lot.
I Could Be Wrong
Now, I’ve said before that I’ve felt a plateau is coming to resort social media following and fan counts, simply because we’ll reach a point where all the true fans are already fans and anyone else we get to click “like” will take some extra motivation.
In fact, we may have already hit that point. What I didn’t account for were two factors:
- Paid fan acquisition becoming a more regular part of marketing strategy
- The fact that with more practice, resorts are getting better and better at SM
Resort social media marketing really hasn’t been around that long. So I suppose it should be no surprise that when we’re 30% older in the field than we were last year, we might have gotten 30% better.
Either way, it’s an interesting trend and will be a fun one to watch.