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.

Can social media data be used as an alternative to traditional surveys to understand tourists’ preferences for nature‐based experiences in protected areas? We explored this by comparing preferences for biodiversity obtained from a traditional survey conducted in Kruger National Park, South Africa, with observed preferences assessed from over 13,600 pictures shared on Instagram and Flickr by tourists visiting the park in the same period. We found no significant difference between the preferences of tourists as stated in the surveys and the preferences revealed by social media content. Overall, large‐bodied mammals were found to be the favorite group, both in the survey and on social media platforms. However, Flickr was found to better match tourists’ preference for less‐charismatic biodiversity. Our findings suggest that social media content can be used as a cost‐efficient way to explore, and for more continuous monitoring of, preferences for biodiversity and human activities in protected areas.

Social media data have been extensively used in numerous fields of science, but examples of their use in conservation science are still very limited. In this paper, we propose a framework on how social media data could be useful for conservation science and practice. We present the commonly used social media platforms and discuss how their content could be providing new data and information for conservation science. Based on this, we discuss how future work in conservation science and practice would benefit from social media data.

Only 5% of global threat data sets meet a “gold standard”