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Note: We have cleaned up our list of tourism organizations some more by deleting several account that are no longer active and also added a couple of new accounts.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?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 16th, 2009 at 3:08 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. 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.