This month’s ranking of US and Canadian destinations on Twitter brings a major improvement – the list is now embedded as a Google doc, making a lot nicer to look at (you just have to scroll now to see all destination on the list).

We found over 100 new destinations on Twitter bringing the total to over 300. Thanks to @nathankam and his list of DMOs on Twitter – lots of destinations we had not been tracking.

Putting the list together is becoming a bigger and bigger project every month, with now over 300 accounts that have to be run through Twitter Grader it takes more than a day just to get the data (thanks to @allisonkpark for helping with this).

The month of April saw @BaltimoreMD returning to the top of the ranking again (no tattoo needed this time), @VisitChicago held it’s second spot. Both destinations have a high number of updates, besides followers an important factor in the Twitter grader algorithm.

(Disclosure as usual: we manage @TravelPortland and @OnlyinSF Twitter accounts and work with many other organizations on the list on social media projects).

Other major developments: @ExpCols launched a Twisitor Center using the hashtag #expcols. As you might know we are huge fans of using Twitter hashtags for visitor information and we hope more destinations will start using them. @iknowdenver just started on Twitter and is using not only one but four different hashtags to identify different information. You have to look at the Denver Twitter page on a web-browser to understand the concept as the information about it is embedded into the background of the page.

If you are still not convinced that using Twitter for visitor information is a good thing, consider this: the Twisitor Center we developed and operate for Travel Portland has generated media impressions worth over one million dollars. And that is just print, not counting social media like Twitter itself. @guykawasaki twittered about it and that tweet itself was re-tweeted multiple times reaching through this process almost half a million Twitter users.

So who else is in, who will be the next destination to use Twitter to identify and answer questions from visitors?

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 3rd, 2009 at 7:22 pm and is filed under Social Media, Tourism, Twitter, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.