The SimpliFlying Social Media Cheatsheet for Airline Marketers

Social technologies are gaining huge traction among airlines. There’s simply no denying it. A couple of months ago, we released an infographic that showed how airlines are dedicating resources to social media. Most major airlines, according to the infographic, already have social media teams in place – most are managing cross-departmental strategies. Some even have plans to expand their teams later this year. That infographic was deemed to be a truly important one as far as the topic of airlines in social media was concerned: it received over 100,000 views and was featured in a number of publications including twice on Mashable itself!

Make sense of the chaos

Now, to add to all the hullaballoo, it really doesn’t help that social technologies are not just adding newer features regularly, but new social technologies themselves are being launched a dime a dozen (any takers for Google+ in airlines?).

So if you’re an airline marketer and thinking really hard about which social technologies to adopt apart from the usual suspects, we have the perfect remedy for your troubles. In fact, even if you’ve figured out which social platforms to adopt, you might still be wondering how best to use them or which business goals you might drive best through them. Well, we have the perfect panacea for you.

The SimpliFlying Social Media Cheatsheet is intended to help airline marketers choose social platforms based on the goals they actually want to drive. And this has been put together after surveying 25 of the best airlines on social media globally!

Drive business goals with ease with this cheatsheet

How do you  use this cheat sheet? Elementary: just choose one of the goals you’d like to drive eg. revenue, loyalty etc. Once you’ve chosen a particular goal (via the columns) you simply have to look at the corresponding rows to see which social platforms drive these goals the best. To help you choose better where multiple platforms drive the same goal, we’ve indicated the optimal platforms by means of three “likes” or thumbs-ups. For the least optimal, but still workable, platform, we’ve gone with a single like. Two “likes”, obviously, indicate a platform that’s between optimal and workable.

We developed this matrix-like cheatsheet based on insights gained from working with our clients, through feedback on our blog and by requesting 25 of the world’s top airlines to answer a short survey.

Some key observations:

1. Facebook is the most used social media tool among airlines
2. Twitter and Groupon are best in driving revenues
3. If you have a small team and looking for maximum impact, just do Facebook and Twitter right. Then expand efforts to YouTube and Foursquare
4. Engagement, followed by customer service and PR are the most well addressed business goals

Here’s the cheat sheet for you to download and print/distribute.