[PRESENTATION] How Airlines Dedicate Resources to Social Media – delivered at #omtravel in Miami (June 2011)

SimpliFlying has always endeavoured to offer the best, cutting-edge insights into the airline industry via its infographics. But even by our standards, we outdid ourselves last week. We produced not only an infographic on a very pertinent question (How Airlines Dedicate Resources to Social Media), but we went one step ahead and produced the first-ever videographic on airlines in social media as well. The response, to put it simply, was overwhelming. Not only did our infographic go viral instantly (it reached about 30,000 people in the first couple of days itself), it was also featured later on Mashable where alone it has received about 3500 views till now. How cool is that?

Now, we’ve also gone ahead and put together a presentation that gives you first-hand access to the wider, more complete data-set collected from airlines.

The key questions we tried to answer via the data collected from about 25 airlines across the world, were: Considering most airlines by now have an active social media presence – Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and even check-in locations for location-based apps – what is the kind of effort they’re putting in to get in fans and followers and start conversations that are meaningful and benefit both the airline as well as the customers? Moreover, since some airlines have more than 1 million fans on Facebook and some have around 10,000, how are airlines managing their social media presence? What plans do they have for managing their teams in the future? How large or small are these teams? Do greater follower numbers imply greater effort?

The answers that popped up were intriguing to say the least.

Key insights

  1. Jet Blue, Southwest Airlines and AirAsia are the tear-away stars on social media in terms of the lead they have in follower numbers on both Twitter and Facebook. Southwest has over 1 million fans on both Facebook and Twitter, the only airline to have achieved this.
  2. However, in terms of the resources used to achieve such a fan following there is no obvious correlation. While JetBlue employs over 30 people to guide its social media efforts, AirAsia which has more than a million fans on Twitter uses only 4. KLM, which has about 300,000 fans overall (Twitter + Facebook) employs over 20 people with plans for expanding the team.
  3. Essentially, there are two major approaches for managing the social media presence. The dedicated model employs people solely for managing social media whereas the integrated model cross-integrates different departments for managing social media efforts.
  4. The data suggests that the integrated model seems to work better than the dedicated model (with the exception of AirAsia) based on follower/fan numbers and True Reach numbers from Klout.
  5. Southwest and AirAsia are managing their resources stunningly well with well over 500,000 followers/fans per staff member.
  6. People from Marketing and Corporate Communications make up about 70% of the people from various departments involved even when the integrated model is used.
  7. Only 18% of airlines say that they have no plans of hiring at all for social media. However, over 50% remained non-committal.
  8. JetBlue seems to be using the integrated model rather successfully – it integrates members from 4 departments, the maximum for any airline surveyed by us.
  9. JetBlue and Virgin America have a stunning conversion rate with respect to getting passengers to become fans. Their fans to passengers ratio is close to 0.1. In other words, for every 10 passengers flown, 1 becomes a fan.

Do check out the Prezi below to view Shashank’s presentation from #omtravel delivered in Miami this June for insights from the infographic.

 

Special thanks, as always, to our good friends over at EezeerDataLab for providing data about the number of tweets in their monthly Twitter reports.

Meanwhile, you can also check out the latest monthly Airlines on Twitter Report for May 2011 to put these presentations into more perspective.

 


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