[INFOGRAPHIC] How Airlines Use Twitter – customer engagement done right, or gone wrong?

Wow, that infographic speaks volumes. The numbers that really scream out are the United numbers. It seems like people want to engage them, but are talking to a brick wall. Sometimes I talk to people and the question comes up if Twitter is hitting a plateau in terms of users acquired. The UAL numbers tell me that once consumer oriented companies start taking advantage of Twitter and the other tools, the userbase of social media will experience another growth spurt.

I still see companies become suddenly quiet on twitter, while other companies change their tweeting style. This tells me that a lot of the social media contacts are handled by seasonal interns, and there is no thought given to how tweeting style and social media engagement reflects the values of the brand. Here may be a better way of doing things: For example, employees in UAL offices could become empowered to respond to social media contacts. An employee would take a 5 minute time-out from their job, look at the stream, pick an un-handled tweet to respond to, and would use internal company contacts and access to fleet status to disposition the tweet. The system would keep track, so follow-ups would show up on the right employee's screen. Or maybe employees could opt into handling tweets for 15 minutes every hour. These employees would receive special training, and access to the system that keeps track of everything. Supervisors would be able to see each thread of messages, and be able to rate the exchanges as “happy customer” or “unhappy customer.” The ratings would help refine the social media strategy of the company, but not used to rate the employees handling the tweets.

Maybe the above is just a pipe-dream. But I would love to see better customer service from all the US airlines, and today social media has to be part of that.

very nice article, thanks

Amazing Figures !!! How does other industries compare !Murray