Last week I published some stats on the Stash that, when all the numbers were crunched, made me do a mental double take.

The question was this: for every 100 followers a resort gets, how many do they lose? The reasoning behind it is that our follower counts aren’t necessarily totals, they’re just a current snapshot. What isn’t visible is how many of them unfollow you.

So, we found out:

The gist: for every 3 followers you gain, you’ll likely lose 1.

Opportunity?
I mentioned a few opportunities in that post, but I wanted to dig a little deeper on one: the idea of watching unfollows as much as we watch follows.

When we post an awesome picture that gets a lot of retweets and, perhaps, an accompanying surge in followers, we rejoice. Angels decent and sing praises to your social media mastery. On the other hand, when we post a dud. Something that we might have expected to blow up, but instead got nothing: zero favorites, zero retweets. If you’re anything like me, you make a mental note and move on.

The Q
My question is this: should we be more diligent in using tools that track who unfollows us as we are in watching our followers? Should we be optimizing content to only get new followers, or also optimizing to reduce follower loss?

Or, for those or you that are already doing this, is it worth the time or is churn just part of the game and, like email, the more engagement you get, the more engagement you get. Meaning, more RTs are also accompanied by more unfollows? Ideas?

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.