RESEARCH


RESEARCH SPECIAL


SWITCHED ON


A survey from ISPA focuses on how US consumers, especially spa-goers, use social media. Leonor Stanton analyses the fi ndings and gets insights from operators


S


Instagram is a hub for spa-goers according to the survey


TABLE 1 Most Popular Social Media Sites


General Population Ever Used


Facebook YouTube LinkedIn Twitter


Pinterest Instagram


82% 75% 42% 41% 38% 31%


Frequently Use


(at least once/week) 68% 40% 16% 23% 18% 18%


Source: Social Media and the Spa-Goer, Consumer Snapshot – Volume V, ISPA 2014 78 spabusiness.com issue 1 2015 ©CYBERTREK 2015


Frequent Social Media Users


Spa-Goers


80% 55% 30% 30% 31% 34%


pas now represent the fifth largest leisure industry in the US with revenues in 2013 of US$14.7bn (€12bn, £9.4bn)


according to the 2014 US Spa Industry Study unveiled by the International Spa Association (ISPA) in October. With more than 20,000 spas attracting some 164 million visits, the opportunities this creates for social media are clearly an area of interest, particularly given that 92 per cent of the US population has interacted with at least one social media platform.


With this in mind, ISPA also released a


consumer survey which takes a deeper look at social media trends and preferences. Separate to the ISPA’s spa industry study, Social Media and the Spa-Goer looks at social media habits in US consumers as a whole, as well as highlighting spa consumer usage. Despite the prevalence of social media space, however, it found that social media sites have “so far failed to really engage the majority of consumers”. We dig deeper to find out why.


Popular platforms Spa-goers are much more likely to be active users and contributors of all social media platforms than the population in the US as a whole, the survey found. Facebook is the platform used by most


(Table 1). However, it’s Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Twitter which are more likely to be used by spa-goers. (Diagram 1) As a result, the survey suggests that,


“despite the fact that Facebook and YouTube are the platforms used by the highest percentage of spa-goers (and the general population as a whole), in some circumstances it may be more beneficial to post to other sites... over half of the users of Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Twitter have visited a spa in the last 12 months, whereas the majority of Facebook and YouTube users have not. In particular,


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