The January "How Social is Your State DMO?" rankings have been completed and published. A few notes on the rankings:
-For the 7th consecutive time, Michigan has topped the rankings at the number one spot. They are followed by Colorado, Virginia, Oregon and Florida.
-The Top 10 continues to be very consistent and a majority of those states ranked there are truly the leaders in social media destination marketing.
- The “Movers” in the Top 25 include Oklahoma, now at 11, up from 27; Maine, at 13, up from 29; North Carolina, at 16 up from 24; Iowa, at 21, up from 43; Georgia, at 23, up from 36; and Mississippi at 25 up from 34.
We made a few changes in the ranking formula to begin emphasizing relevance and engagement. As social media grows and evolves, it is no long sufficient to just participate, organizations must begin to effectively engage. We began the process by looking at the most popular social media outlets for tourism organizations: Facebook and Twitter. Here are some of the adjustments we made:
Facebook – We measured the timing of the last series of postings for relevance. There was also a review of most recent postings. They were each measured for number of likes and comments.
Twitter – We used the application, Klout, to gauge the measurement of influence from its listed score. We also used the application to check the number of re-tweets based on the a series of recent tweets - which we feel represents engagement and relevant content. We also looked how many times the organization has been listed on Twitter. The overall number of tweets as a measurement has been abandoned, as we feel that numbers no longer represent engagement.
For the first time, we included a Geo-location measurement in the study. As this is a new frontier for many, we are currently just applying a credit for participation with a geo-location link added on the front page of the web site. Due to the growth in mobile usage, we feel this will have a great social impact in the future and we will continue to develop updated measurement criteria.
To view the full rankings for January 2011 with a sharing friendly link, visit: http://budurl.com/HowSocialStateDMO8 Please keep the comments and feedback coming, as we will continue to consider them in future measurements.
The next state DMO study will be published in April. We hope to add some additional measurements for geo-location presence in the next rankings. Thanks again to @lbach22 for her hard work on January rankings. For more info on social media and tourism, be sure to follow Dave Serino on Twitter: @GammetGuy and fan Gammet Interactive on Facebook: www.Facebook.com/Gammet
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