Engagement on social media (specifically, on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram) with travel-related brands was down 38 percent year-over-year from May 2021 to May 2022, according to Shareablee powered by Comscore.
Engagements, or actions, is the sum of likes, shares and comments.
The decline is likely due to the fact that there was a “boom in travel engagements in 2021 when COVID restrictions were lifted in many locations,” points out Madison Busick, analyst at Comscore.
Travel brands include airlines, travel websites, travel agencies, tourism boards, cruise lines, car rental companies, and tourist destinations such as zoos, museums and amusement parks.
While Instagram accounted for 53 percent of actions for the industry in May 2022, airlines had a 155 percent growth in Twitter actions year-over-year, which could coincide with customer service issues and flight delays, adds Busick.
Despite this, only one airline, Southwest Airlines, made the top-10 brands on Twitter, in terms of engagement.
Followers Increase
Despite the decline in engagement, the travel industry saw an increase in fans and followers across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter year over year of about 4 percent overall.
Some of the sub-industries with the top growth were zoos ( up 15 percent), Hotels & Resorts ( up 4.86 percent), and Airlines ( up 4.37 percent).
On Facebook, Oregon Zoo saw an average of 37.8K actions on its 21 pieces of content, which focused on photos and videos of various animals (compared with an average of 4.2K actions on Twitter).
Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden and San Antonio Zoo also made the top-10 with regard to Facebook actions, though they had far lower efficiencies at 7.7K actions and 3.7K actions, respectively.
YouTube subscribers were up 11 percent for the industry, with museums (up 22 percent), car rentals (up 17 percent) and tourism boards (up 14 percent) seeing the biggest increases.
