Instagram, Flickr, or Twitter: Assessing the usability of social media data for visitor monitoring in protected areas

Henrikki Tenkanen,Vuokko Heikinheimo,Tuuli Toivonen,Enrico Di Minin,Anna Hausmann,Marna Herbst,Liisa Kajala

doi:10.1038/s41598-017-18007-4

Abstract

Social media data is increasingly used as a proxy for human activity in different environments, including protected areas, where collecting visitor information is often laborious and expensive, but important for management and marketing. Here, we compared data from Instagram, Twitter and Flickr, and assessed systematically how park popularity and temporal visitor counts derived from social media data perform against high-precision visitor statistics in 56 national parks in Finland and South Africa in 2014. We show that social media activity is highly associated with park popularity, and social media-based monthly visitation patterns match relatively well with the official visitor counts. However, there were considerable differences between platforms as Instagram clearly outperformed Twitter and Flickr. Furthermore, we show that social media data tend to perform better in more visited parks, and should always be used with caution. Based on stakeholder discussions we identified potential reasons why social media data and visitor statistics might not match: the geography and profile of the park, the visitor profile, and sudden events. Overall the results are encouraging in broader terms: Over 60% of the national parks globally have Twitter or Instagram activity, which could potentially inform global nature conservation.

Highlights

Social media data is increasingly used as a proxy for human activity in different environments, including protected areas, where collecting visitor information is often laborious and expensive, but important for management and marketing
Comparison between social media posts and official visitor statistics show that all social media platforms can relatively well reveal the popularity of the parks
When extending the inspection to temporal visitation pattern, i.e. the monthly visitation rate of each park, our results show that the visitation patterns derived from social media follow relatively well the visitation patterns seen in the official statistics

Summary

Introduction

Social media data is increasingly used as a proxy for human activity in different environments, including protected areas, where collecting visitor information is often laborious and expensive, but important for management and marketing. Recreation and nature-based tourism are key sectors for tourism, and protected areas are the cornerstone of these industries, receiving approximately 8 billion visitors a year[2] Protected areas, such as national parks, help meet the local and international biodiversity targets[3]. Flickr is one of the oldest social media platforms (established in 2004), popular especially for sharing pictures, whereas Twitter (established in 2006) is arguably the most used short-text discussion forum in the world Newer platforms such as Instagram (established in 2010) have recently gained popularity among people owning smartphones with high-quality cameras. Instagram remains a relatively unexplored source of data for research, it has been gaining momentum recently[17,22,25,26,31]

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Conclusion