Did you know that more than half of the tweets generated by tourism organizations in the US and Canada are generated by just 13% of tourism Twitter accounts?

Now that we are tracking almost all of the official Twitter accounts of city and state tourism offices we have turned our attention to analyzing the data we have some more. As of next month we will not only host this (ugly) list on a much nicer website, we will also offer some more analysis of that data. Stay tuned.
In the meantime enjoy the the monthly ranking of tourism Twitter accounts for April.

@I_LOVE_NY, @onlyinsf, @Vegas continuing to grow at an impressive pace. Remember the days when growing an account to over 1,000 followers seem like a monumental milestone? Now the fastest growing accounts add that number of followers in half a month.

Note: as always we used Twitter Grader to compile this list.

Another milestone in our monthly ranking of tourism organizations in the US and Canada that are using Twitter: @I_LOVE_NY broke through 20,000 followers as the first tourism Twitter account.

Here is how the rest did at the end of March 2010:

We will be adding more accounts like @TravelMd for the April reporting. Let us know if you find other tourism Twitter accounts we are missing.

Ok, ok, I admit it – it took us a while to get our first DMO ranking for 2010 out but there are good reasons for the delay. We ran our reports for January and February and were playing around with changing some of the metrics to make them more meaningful. We got some interesting insight but we decided that for now we will keep using Twitter Grader as a neutral, public, third party tool.

Several destinations changed their Twitter names which can lead to some data and reporting confusion as you can see in the February data.

We are working on adding more metrics and analysis and will probably blend them with this “traditional” ranking.

If you have thoughts on how we can improve or add to this report, let us know!

With this post we close the year 2009 – slightly later than we had hoped … but finally it is here, the ranking of tourism organizations for December 2009.

Or list of DMOs that we track has grown to over 450. All major destinations have a presence – a year ago we were only able to find 109 official tourism Twitter accounts in the US and Canada. Only four accounts on that list had more than 300 followers, today more than 330 accounts have more followers than that.

2009 has been a wild ride in social media and tourism marketing, what will 2010 bring?

The year is almost over – you have 2 weeks left to work on your Twitter account and finish the year with a top ranking. To see who you are up against, have a look at the Twitter ranking of official destination Twitter accounts in the US and Canada for November 09. As usual we used Twitter Grader to put the ranking together.

Stay tuned for the final ranking of the year in 3 weeks!

Thanks to Twitter’s new list feature we have been able to find almost 100 new twitter accounts, most of them in the US and Canada. And we are for sure still missing many more. We list all Twitter accounts we can find at Twisitorcenter.com and as you can see the map is getting pretty crowded.

We have added all the new accounts we found to our monthly ranking of tourism organizations on Twitter – the list is now over 450 DMOs long.

As in the September ranking the top 60 accounts at the end of October (as ranked by using Twitter Grader) are only margins apart.

If you have any good lists for tourism organizations on Twitter we should follow, let us know!

As in every month we spend hours to grade all tourism organizations (US and Canada) we could find on Twitter using Twitter Grader. As you can see from the data below at the end of September the top 50 destinations on the list all had basically the same score.

Some of you had asked what our criteria are for listing a DMO Twitter account. There are basically two rules we have:

a) The account must be the account of an official tourism organization.

b) We only list one account per organization.
Several tourism organizations have multiple accounts (either by department function, e.g. consumer / PR / membership) or have several people tweeting on behalf of the organization. We have decided to list only one account per organization as the list would otherwise get even longer and it would make deciding which accounts should be on the list even more complicated.

If there is interest in having a lists of all Twitter accounts for destinations without a ranking we could put such a list together. Just let us know.

We have added several more accounts to the list since we put this one together at the end of September. If we are missing accounts, please let us know.

Our monthly ranking of US and Canadian tourism organizations on Twitter for the month of August brought quite a number of changes.

To put things into perspective here is some background information. For the ranking we use Twitter Grader, a third party tool that compares several million Twitter accounts and calculates a score for each of the accounts. The formula they use is not disclosed but if you look at this month’s ranking you can see that two factors have a lot of influence: the number of Twitter updates and the number of new followers. Both do not necessarily mean high levels of engagement with followers.

And we really think it is important to point this out as many of you use our monthly ranking for benchmarking purposes. We have said it here before and we will say it again: this ranking gives a good overview of what DMOs are doing on Twitter, it does not offer insights on the success they are having using Twitter.

So what is new?

The ranking for August shows a couple of interesting things:

Some DMOs now tweet A LOT. Take @SeattleMaven or @explorechicago who both had on average more than 35 post per day (including weekends). Very impressive but many of you will probably ask if they are getting a good ROI considering that it takes a lot of time to post 40 – 50 Twitter updates every day. One thing that is clear is that more updates will lead to a better grade on Twitter Grader.

To grow your number of followers you need to tell the world you are on Twitter. @nycgo is the perfect example. They managed to grow their following by over 1,200 with less than 5 tweets a day (each tweet = time = money). How did they do it? Telling the world they are on Twitter, e.g. through prominent banner ads on the main landing page for the official nycgo.com website. If you want to get more followers you need to advertise your accounts – if not through banner ads then at least through prominent links on your website, email newsletters, links in the signatures of staff emails etc.

Note: We have cleaned up our list of tourism organizations some more by deleting several account that are no longer active and also added a couple of new accounts. More new accounts will be added for the September ranking.

Our thoughts – what are yours?
The question of measurement and ROI for social media is becoming more and more important. Everybody should have a clear set of metrics and report one those. These metrics need to be in line with your overall strategic objectives. Examples: if growing awareness about your destination as a wine region is a strategic goal, click-throughs on “wine-tweets” can be a good metric. If reaching DMO members (hotels, restaurants) is important, the number of conversations and re-tweets by members is a good measurement. If you targeting out of town visitors the location of your followers is really key. Getting more followers locally does not help that goal and you should be using Twitter tools that analyze the geographic distribution of your followers to see if you are on the right track.

What are your thoughts? What is the optimal number of tweets per day? Is promoting Twitter accounts (or other social media presences) important? What is working for you? How are you aligning your social media measurements with your strategic objectives?

And here it is – the July ranking for US and Canada tourism organizations using Twitter. The overall number has not changed much – we added several new ones but at the same time deleted several accounts that were no longer active or used for tourism (thanks for all your feedback!).

Every month we get question about the algorithm used to compile this list and every month we have to point to Twitter Grader – the 3rd party tool we use to compile this list. As Twitter Grader does not disclose their exact formula we also have only limited insight which factors influence the grade for a Twitter account. If you want to learn more check out this blog post.

And while we talk a lot about Twitter on this blog we think nobody should overlook the possibilities that Facebook offers. We have a ranking for destinations on Facebook as well (unpublished yet), the main downside being that there are no tools for Facebook that measure engagement in a more sophisticated way than just looking at number of fans. If there is interest in that list or if you know of a way to include other parameters let us know.

And while we talk about Facebook we also want to make sure than anybody who uses social media for marketing or PR has seen the huge changes Facebook launched today: the ability to search all public wall posts from all users. The search is not very sophisticated yet but count on Facebook to develop tools around that or give 3rd party developers to build tools. These tools will sit of course within the Facebook platform (unlike on Twitter where the API allows for data portability). Very clever – and very scary if you are a Facebook user and are not sure what your current privacy settings are.

As an example see this screenshot of a search for the term “vacation” within posts by everyone. I think some interesting information for the travel space could be found in these posts …

Of course the Facebook mechanism are different than the one from Twitter and connecting with somebody is very different than just following somebody on Twitter. But the changes in search show that Facebook is paying close attention to Twitter and adopting to be more competitive.

Here is the Twitter ranking for July 09 – as usual we rely on your feedback to add new accounts or delete inactive ones.

And as in the past we want to disclose that we work with several DMOs on their social media strategy (e.g. Travel Portland, San Francisco CVB) as well as tourism clients who are just in the process of launching their social media presence and will show up on the list over the next months.

The number of tourism organizations using Twitter continues to grow, although at a slower pace. We are now tracking over 350 tourism organizations, some more have been brought to our attention after this June 30th snapshot. Most major destinations have now established a presence but some big ones are still missing.

Where are California or Boston for example? They have registered an account to protect their name and brand but are not using the accounts.

Did they miss the boat or are they just smarter than anybody else? What are tourism organizations getting out of Twitter? Some organizations have stopped using Twitter and shut down their accounts. Others are posting less often (and spending less time on Twitter).

In our ranking through Twitter Grader the top 4 positions remain unchanged but @nycgo picked up over 2,000 new followers in June to know rank Nr. 5. At the end of June six destinations had more than 5,000 followers. It seems that at least some DMOs are getting a good return for their time spend on Twitter.

Kissimmee became the latest destination to launch an official “Twisitor Center” where visitors can use Twitter to ask travel related questions and get answers in real time. And while they are not the first to use Twitter in this form as a tool for customer service, they still got good PR for it. Which proves that Twitter still has a buzz-factor that can be used for public relations work.

But at the same time a lot of organizations seem to be putting a lot of time into Twitter (measured by number of updates) without getting that much traction. It does not seem unlikely that over the next months more accounts will be shut down.

So what are your thoughts on this? Are you having success with your destination Twitter account? If so, how do measure the success? What do you think will the future hold for tourism and Twitter?