How much is a Twitter follower worth and which hotel Twitter accounts are the most valuable?
Seventh Art Media, a social media strategist for hotels, says it studied 135 hotel Twitter accounts and 120,000 tweets from Nov. 1, 2010, to Jan. 31, 2011, and came up with some answers.
Here's Seventh Art Media's Top 20 Hotel Twitter Accounts by Valuation:
The five hotel Twitter accounts with the highest valuation, according to Seventh Art Media, are the Cosmopolitan Hotel & Casino Las Vegas, the Four Seasons, the Venetian Las Vegas, Roger Smith Hotel and Mandarin Oriental.
The company says its ranking is global since it evaluated both the Twitter accounts of local properties and global brands.
Seventh Art Media discloses that the study's lead author worked on social media strategy for the Cosmopolitan Hotel & Casino Las Vegas -- which the study cites as having the Twitter account with the highest valuation, $445,688 -- so take that into account when gauging the results.
"The valuations are all based on publicly available data of tweets, retweets, mentions through the Twitter API, so nothing is fake," says Oliver Sohn, a partner in Seventh Art Group. "[It's all objective -- everyone can recalculate the numbers. And again, the ranking was not the goal of the paper but just a result of the valuation tool needed in the process of determining how hotels can grow valuable Twitter accounts, what strategies work well and which don't."
[For a more detailed explanation of the methodology, see the Note below this post.]
The chart makes clear that quality of followers and not the number of followers is key in operating a Twitter account of value.
"In just a few months’ time, the newly launched Cosmopolitan Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas has created the most valuable hotel Twitter account among all those studied," according to the study, Hospitality Brands and Twitter -- Creating a Valuable (Bottom-Line) Asset. "The highest valuation for an independent hotel’s Twitter account is the Roger Smith Hotel in New York City. In both cases, these accounts have lower followings than some of their direct competition but by focusing on engagement and building quality follower bases they have created far more value. So the question is clearly not 'how many followers do I need?' but 'how do I get the right followers?'"
The study, which is available for free download here, identifies several best practices and insights for building valuable hotel Twitter accounts:
- Focus on the long-term and "slow but quality growth.
- Handle Facebook and Twitter accounts separately -- "efforts are complementary, but should not overlap."
- Facebook's value is in creating "reach and amplification," requires strong content, but "is weak in creating sustained engagement" while "Twitter is an engagement platform.
- Klout scores are only a starting point -- "Unengaged followers are a black hole for content and add no value to a hotel's social media efforts and investments."
- Now is the opportune time to invest in social media and hotels can "realize measurable ROI levels ..."
NOTE on methodology and creating a valuation model for Twitter accounts: "The recommended approach is to create an equivalency with CPM-based online advertising. While we would argue that a recommendation or positive review posted via Twitter to the rightnetwork has a higher value than even the best placed banner advertisement we have insteadmodeled out impressions against an average quoted rate of $6.31 CPM specific for travel (via Adify Media).
"Additional assumptions required for the Twitter valuation model have been purposefully made very conservative and aim to provide a floor for the valuation as opposed to hyping the channel. Most importantly we don’t assume universal consumption of tweets. Only 30% of Twitter accounts are considered regularly active so we have discounted reach by 70% across the network. In other words, just because a hotel tweeted and has 10,000 followers, we cannot assume that each of these potential impressions generated an actual impression. In our model we assume 3,000 followers actually saw the tweet… By combining reach, CPM equivalency rates with average tweet, mention and retweet volumes we have made an assessment of the value of 107 of the 135 Twitter accounts we reviewed as part of this study."