NB: This is a guest article by Jamie Riddell, CEO and co-founder of Digital Tomorrow Today.
Airlines on Twitter are constantly looking for more. More followers means larger potential audience, more clicks, sales, engagement with their audience.
Different airlines take different approaches to achieving this growth. British Airways has tried promoted tweets whilst KLM have surprised socially connected travellers.
But are these methods the only way for airlines to boost followers and results?
Using BirdSong: Social Media Reconnaissance we looked at a number of airlines to share some other examples of what they are doing, and could do for growth. We took a random survey of airlines to cover BA, Virgin Atlantic, Qantas, American Airlines, BMI, KLM, United and Southwest Airlines.
Of the airlines we surveyed, all except BMI and Qantas offered links from the homepage to Twitter.
This connection seems like a no-brainer – announcing your twitter presence is logical on your homepage – it works to drive visitors to your twitter stream and act as a recognition of your validity on twitter, helpful when someone else owns @Qantas
What they all fail to do is explain why one should follow them on Twitter. This is a key point that is often missed.
You wouldn’t ask for someone’s email address without offering the benefit or at least trade off (deals, offers etc.) so why should we assume the consumer want to follow an airline?
The small links on the page are currently a good first step but could benefit from a greater statement of benefits for the customers.
Presence is an essential point that is missed by most airlines. British Airways, for example states its Twitter presence as nine-to-five, Monday to Friday, yet its audience will be active for more than just these hours and particular days.
No doubt the call centre was optimised many years ago, to ensure presence at the busiest times for the business, so why not Twitter? Of the airlines reviewed, only Cathay Pacific and Southwest Air came close to maintaing an extended presence.
The style of tweeting is also an important trait that will aid or hamper engagement. An account that tweets but does not reply could be seen as a simple broadcaster, offering little opportunity for engagement, whereas an account just replying is either purely reactive or set up to handle responses only.
We believe a succesful account offer a combination fo tweets, replies and retweets.
Of the accounts reviewed, all were most active in replying to customers. Between 65% [Southwest Airlines] and 97.6% [Qantas] of all tweets were replies, making these accounts more reactive than proactive.
Looking at the actual tweets, we can see some broad themes coming from these airline accounts. “Sorry” is a word that appears frequently in all accounts with additional references to customer care operatives showing personality of engagement.
Here is Virgin’s content volume:
As the accounts measured are more reactive than reactive we can see the language measured for support and apology.
If these accounts were also actively used for flight promotions we would expect to see references of ‘flights’ and other terms one would see in a search campaign.
But which airline is doing it best? KLM has received praise for unique approach to wider social engagement and Southwest has been noted for its social presence.
Other social networks like Pinterest, Instagram and Facebook have more obvious success metrics one can observe – likes and repins on Pinterest are signs of engagement mirrored by likes and comments on Instagram and Facebook.
From an independent review of Twitter accounts we can only share the follower numbers as one visible metric. Nevertheless, airlines no doubt are measuring their own definitions of success, from clicks to customer service metrics.
The top airlines on Twitter, based on our survey.
- Southwest Airlines @southwestair – 1,295,554 followers
- American Airlines @AmericanAir – 369,019 followers
- KLM @KLM – 253,678
- BA North America @britishairways – 216,821 followers
- BA Global @british_airways – 174,177 followers
- United @united – 114,244 followers
- Qantas @qantasairways – 80,805 followers
- Virgin Atlantic @virginatlantic – 72,233 followers
- BMI @flybmi – 11,462 followers
Here is an example of the Qantas dashboard:
NB: This is a guest article by Jamie Riddell, CEO and co-founder of Digital Tomorrow Today. BirdSong is its latest product and delivers on-demand insight for any brand on Twitter.
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About Special Nodes
thanks for publishing this interesting data etc.. we have been measuring customer care on Twitter fro approx 3-4 months now and have some great data.. we are now tracking well over 1500+ businesses, and that includes both the airlines and airport sectors..
Social media and inparticular Twitter is without doubt a fast growing environment for customers and consumers to utilise to complain, ask questions, see advice, gain info etc…but the huge difference is that it is all done in a public space.. If the business answers and deals with the customer well, then no only can they win the customer round, but they can also gain a potential advocate and be seen to be doing this in public… do it badly and the whole world can see..
in the engagenentIndex we measure tweets that are aimed at the business that begin with their correct twitterusername and then did they reply.. we then give them an enagagementIndex score..
you can see all our data here:-
http://www.engagementIndex.co.uk
thanks and kind regards
Mark Shaw
CEO engagementIndex
Thanks for the interesting analysis. The one (critical) metric you don’t mention is followers as a % of passengers carried, or even of loyalty programme members or regular travellers. On any of those metrics most airlines are hardly influencing anyone ( of value) via twitter.
Of course, this might be true of many other businesses too!
Mr Sceptical Corporate Traveller – where can we get passenger data ? We can put a measurement in if we have data but bear in mind we cannot cross reference the passenger list with Twitter followers so we can’t get the direct %.