We have previously looked on Skipedia at which ski resorts in France, Austria and Italy and across Europe have the most Facebook fans.

But how useful are absolute figures? Surely you would expect a resort with more visitors to have more Facebook fans?

We thought we’d look more closely at the figures to find out who is performing the best, relatively speaking.

Data from the International Report on Snow and Mountain Tourism

We took the figures for the total number of skier visits, as published by Lauren Vanat in the well-regarded 2014 International Report on Snow and Mountain Tourism and then cross-referenced them with the official Facebook pages for each resort.

We then were able to produce the list below that shows who is performing the best on Facebook, relative to the number of visitors they receive.

The Top 10 Ski Resorts on Facebook (Relatively)

The stand-out fact is that four of the top five and six of the 10 are North America resorts. Our friends across the Atlantic are just plain better at social media that we are in Europe.

Val Thorens prides itself on being a digital resort and their 3rd place backs this up. We recently looked at some of the ways Val Thorens markets itself online, following their 2012 rebrand.

Grand Valira leads the way in Andorra, with Stubai taking the honours in Austria.

From 11 to 20…

This is less dominated by the North American resorts. St Moritz takes top spot amongst Swiss resorts and Cortina for the Italians.

Chamonix will be pleased to be the second most successful French resort after their own recent rebrand, particularly as their ‘official’ page was only launched a couple of years ago.

From 21 to 40…

Caveats

These calculations are subject to a few caveats.

Some resorts have very popular unofficial Facebook pages, and Vanat’s report does not indicate exact skier days. Additionally some resorts are part of regions, such as the Jungfrauregion, which are not accounted for separately in the resort data, but have their own popular Facebook pages.

Finally, we only looked at resorts that had a minimum of 800,000 skier days. This excludes many smaller ski resorts who are doing great work on social media – one day we’ll try and do a list for everyone!

By Iain Martin