The social media runway of Harrisburg International Airport – how a small airport made it big online

This is a guest article by Stephanie Gehman, who leads Marketing at Harrisburg International Airport and contributed this article earlier to SimpliFlying Tribes, an exclusive community of the world’s Top 150 travel marketers. The airport was also featured in our Top 10 airports on social media case-study pack.
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How Harrisburg went social…

At Harrisburg International Airport (MDT), we jumped aboard the social media bandwagon in mid-2008 with a Facebook profile and the fly HIA blog. Since then we have expanded the profile into a business page, we regularly tweet on Twitter, photo share on Flickr, opened our YouTube channel for the aviation geek in all of us, maintain a LinkedIn group, and we’re just getting started with Tumblr.  Combined, these social media platforms help us routinely and intimately serve the needs of several thousand of the travelers in our facility.

The impact social media has had at MDT

The benefits of these platforms are both direct and indirect. Below are six of the most significant benefits we’ve experienced at MDT.

  1. Using social media has afforded us the opportunity to build relationships. we are now able to communicate with air travelers in a real-time manner and even have the opportunity to occasionally meet them when they’re in the building departing for a flight.
  2. We’ve extended the reach of our customer information department. We cannot always directly fix the issue, but social media, especially Facebook and Twitter, are means to efficiently acknowledge a problem and let the customer know that we want to help remedy that which warranted their public post or tweet.
  3. HIA has increased our expedience in sharing airport-related condition reports. We can, with great efficiency, tweet and post to Facebook, reports related to weather, delay, and roadway conditions that may impact a traveler’s commute to/from MDT.
  4. Social networking facilitates conversation with worldwide industry professionals. We’ve re-tweeted or reposted the content of professionals from across to globe, as well as those folks right in our backyard. There are intelligent people on the other side of those tweets and posts, and many of them are happy to answer questions or share their insight and opinions on activity transpiring in the aviation industry.
  5. HIA has a new means to market our brand and our vendors/partners. We will continue to utilize traditional means of advertising, such as print, radio, outdoor, etc.  However, we can take the message of those efforts to social networking and engage our followers/friends in dialogue about that message.
  6. Social networking amplifies the reach of and the visits to our website. Now that Google and Bing are including social content in their organic search engine results, MDT has the ability to appear more frequently and steadily in a host of categorical searches we may not have appeared in before.

I could detail a number of other benefits that MDT has reaped from social media, but all-in all, the common theme is that of community building, engaging and conversing with those audiences that have a vested interest in the airport, and the airlines and vendors operating at MDT.  All of these benefits build off of and are directly related to engaging with users in dialogue, instead of the monologue that results from traditional means of marketing and advertising.

Don’t miss out social media’s interactive and real-time value that can complement your traditional advertising and marketing strategy.  And more importantly, don’t miss out on the opportunity to engage and converse with that core group of supporters who are willing to routinely purchase your product or service and recommend your business to others.

How does social media impact your company? What are your everyday benefits?

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