Yesterday we published our monthly ranking of US tourism organizations on Twitter. Over the next days we will analyze the data some more and see if Twitter is really having an impact on tourism or if it just a fad. 

In this post we rank the 50 destinations that picked up the most followers in December of 08.

Pennylvania picked up almost 500 new followers, followed by Cleveland and Chicagoland.

Soon several DMOs will have more than 1,000 followers and if you look at the average number of daily updates this means that it will be possible to make several thousand contacts with consumes every day.

And here is a quick look at the growth rates for the three most followed and three fastest growing destinations over the last 3 months.

Most followed:

Fastest growing:

Of course now we all want to know what @paadventure did on December 2nd when they picked up 200 new users in just one day. 

And don’t forget: if you work for a tourism organization and have not participated in the “Social Media in Tourism” survey then please click here and give us your thoughts. The survey will close at the end of this week.

Another month has ended – time to see which new destination have started using Twitter and time to again rank all destinations we could find on Twitter.

Queen Anne of Chicagoland was able to defend the Nr. 1 position, picking up over 300 new followers in December alone. VisitChicago and BaltimoreMD both have now more than 1,000 followers. But other are catching up, @paadventure is closing the gap very fast.

We added 21 new destinations to our Twitter list. VisitMesa made a very impressive entry capturing the Nr. 20 spot on the list. More detailed analysis of the data in the next days.

As usual please let us know which destination we are missing. Leave a comment on the blog or D us on Twitter @coldinpdx or @ariannap.

And please do not forget to participate in the survey about tourism organizations and social media. 10 minutes is all it takes, results will be shared with all participants. Click here for the survey.

Another month has passed and so it is time again to publish our list of US destinations on Twitter. Did Baltimore manage to get to over 1,000 followers? Did VisitChicago continue it’s drive to the top of the list? Who moves up the list, who drops down? Will any newcomer manage to go straight into the Top 10?

We will publish a more detailed look at the top DMOs in the next days with some very interesting insights into e.g. conversations, followers vs. following, frequency of updates etc.

And then of course we are looking forward to see the results for end of December? Will VisitChicago defend the Nr. 1 spot or will Baltimore take it back? Will Columbus leverage the social media training the staff got or will Philadelphia use the power of it’s more than 700 followers? With the Top 4 so close together this could turn into a friendly competition that will make any football and baseball rivalry look really boring.

Here are the answers for November and some explanations about the table:

We use TwitterGrader to rank all US destinations that we could find on Twitter. We only list Twitter accounts are are (or at least look to be) “official”, e.g. we do not list accounts from individual DMO employees. 

The change in ranking we only show for destinations that we have tracked for at least 2 months.

As always please let us know if we are missing any destinations.

When we talk to tourism organizations about social media we point out the usual advantages social media provides. The key ones are obviously the opportunity to listen to, talk with and engage visitors – before, while and after they are in a city or region.

This sometimes creates an interesting reaction, usually from the convention side of the business. They phrase it nicer but it comes down to this: “We do not care that much about visitors once they have made the decision to come to our city”. Really? Did I just hear you say that?

Well, not so fast.

Have you had a more detailed look at your budget lately, Mr. VP of Convention Sales? Chances are a good chunk of money is spent on something called a “Visitors Center”. It is a place where visitors can go to get information during their trip – way after they have made their decision to come to your beautiful town.

Probably you will now say that that money is well spent. After all the visitors will have a much better time because they get guided to the right places. And then they can write in one of the books that are lying around at the visitors center and share with everybody how much fun they had. Everybody who reads the book that is.

You see, you do not need a “Visitors Center” – you need a “Twisitors Center”. A way for visitors to get the advice and recommendations they are looking for – no matter where they are. A place to share stories, photos and experiences with millions of people all over the world – before, during and after the trip. Tools like Twitter are cheap, offer great ways to measure success and are what more and more visitors are using to get – and share – their travel information.

So, what are you doing for your Twisitors?

A new, very neat tool allows users to analyze twitter patterns: day, time and frequency of posts for a particular user. Bubbles show the number of tweets for a particular time for each day of the week as well as replies by that user for that time.

I ran reports for some of the top twitter users in tourism with interesting results:

Experience Columbus uses an RSS feed to push content. Most Tweets are pushed shortly after midnight EST / 9pm PST. What this means is that many times when I check Twitter in the morning, I have a long list of Columbus tweets sitting on top of each other. And first thing in the morning I have to check email – no time to check tweets. And therefore not the best strategy to engage me.

Baltimore also pushes feeds via RSS but also engages consumers with replies and non-feed posts. The feeds are pushed in the morning (8am / 9am EST) which seems to be a better time to get clicks of tweets.

Philadelphia has truly some amazing engagement with Twitter users, activity on Twitter is spread out over the day. I recommend following some of the discussions that are taking place here as a best practice.

Arizona has great engagement as well but all Twitter activity takes place from Monday to Friday between 8am and 5pm.

So what are the learnings? If you push a RSS feed via Twitter, time it so the tweets go out during the day, not at night. Even better, find a way to spread the tweets out so users have time to digest them. But don’t limit your account to pushing feeds only, that is not what Twitter’s strength is. Reply, discuss, ask, reach out. And if you really want to engage and connect with consumers, you have to be there 7 days a week. Hey, nobody said this would not be a lot of work!

A new report by Forrester is causing some controversy by claiming that RSS usage has peaked at 11% of mainstream consumer adoption. If that were the case if would be a sad story for everybody in the content business.

I have to agree with those who say that the questionnaire was flawed. The vast majority of consumers on the web uses RSS feeds but have no clue that they are doing so. They just see and enjoy the results in form of personalized pages, widgets feeds and more.

At this point it is also no longer about RSS anymore. The point is that today as a web user I will decided which content I want, from whom I want it, when I want it and where I want it. RSS is of course the main vehicle for that allowing me for example to “blend” my own newspaper by getting local news from one source, business news from another, weather from a third etc. and looking at it on e.g. Netvibes or Pageflakes.

But the same principle applies to other feeds like Twitter (here we go again) where a user can decide who to follow, Friendfeed etc.

Smart content no longer lives on a website, it is mobile and gets pulled into the place where people want to consume it. If your content is not mobile and flexible it will die a lonely death.

If you have not guessed it- we at GoSeeTell are pretty high on Twitter, but even if you have not been drinking our Kool-Aid there are some tools and resources worth checking out, if only for productivity and sanity’s sake.

Let’s face it, Twitter is a slippery slope to losing an entire afternoon if you allow yourself to wander into the depths of the twitterverse. The next time you want to know what the masses are linking to, a great way to remain on the forefront of internet trends and conversations, head to Twitturly.com.

Twitturly tracks the 100 most popular sites over a 24-hour sliding time scale, so content remains fresh and quality high. The site’s spiders count the votes in this popularity contest by following each link posted on Twitter, even those using tinyurl or Snipurl (snurl), to the final URL, so every link is counted.

While this site will help you find popular sites faster, I cannot promise that you won’t still lose track of time as you surf Twitter’s top 100– do not say we did not warn you.

Disclaimer: Given the impending election many of the most popular sites are politically influenced, so if this is not your cup of tea skip those links. Regardless you will learn about the sites that have received tweeple seal of approval.

We will start blogging more about Twitter tools and Twitter sites we like.
If you have been using Twitter for a while you will probably know many of these tools already.

Are you having a hard time finding the right people to follow?
Want to see who you should follow but are not following yet?

Try Twannabe.

Twannabe allows you to quickly compare your list of users who you are following to another user’s list.
So pick somebody you think know the area you are interested in very well and see who they are following. Simple as that. More difficult is managing the increased number of tweets resulting form this exercise.