If travel companies ever need proof why they should have a presence on YouTube and Facebook, it is here: the duo capture 75% of all visits to social networks in the UK.
Figures from Hitwise for April 2011 show that YouTube accounts for one in five visits by UK web users to social networks, the video sharing giant's highest ever share of the overall social media pie.
The Google-owned site has jumped from having a 17% share of visits to social networks in the UK in April 2010 to 20% within 12 months.
Facebook captures around 55% of all social network-related visits (up 1% on April 2010), while Twitter - for all the hype and use by celebrities - accounts for just 3% of the overall social media landscape in the UK.
In terms of wider web behaviour, Google still accounts for a massive nine in ten of all web searches - a drop of 1% year-on-year, but still a seemingly unassailable lead (Microsoft picked up a 1% increase year on year to 4% overall).
Experian Hitwise research director Robin Goad says:
"If you look at the year-on-year trends, you can see that Microsoft is slowly eroding Google's grip on the UK search market, but as the April data shows, the gains for Microsoft at the moment are relatively small, and easily lost."
The question, of course, is how can travel businesses boost their presence on social networks, given the sheer volume of traffic hitting the sites on a daily basis.
For some it is creating reams of content to add to channels (YouTube) or fan pages (Facebook). Others can simply rely on the good fortune of customers to create compelling material on their behalf.
The Shangri-La Hotel in Sydney probably couldn't have asked for a better promo clip than this wonderful time-lapse effort by a recent guest:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfF_kIA6mv8