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Decision makers need information on the use of, and demand for, public recreation and transportation facilities. Innovations in monitoring technologies and diffusion of social media enable new approaches to estimation of demand. We assess the feasibility of using geo-tagged photographs uploaded to the image-sharing website Flickr and tweets from Twitter as proxy measures for urban trail use. We summarize geo-tagged Flickr uploads and tweets along 80 one-mile segments of the multiuse trail network in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and correlate results with previously published estimates of annual average daily trail traffic derived from infrared trail monitors. Although heat maps of Flickr images and tweets show some similarities with maps of variation in trail traffic, the correlation between photographs and trail traffic is moderately weak (0.43), and there is no meaningful statistical correlation between tweets and …