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A year ago, the mobile photo social network Instagram had less than ten million users.  Yet it was growing faster than Facebook or Twitter were at comparable periods.

As a result, it attracted a fair amount of attention, and a few early adopter airline brands signed up, recognising the obvious link between travel and people taking and sharing pictures with their mobile phones. Fast-forward and the now Facebook-owned network has over fifty million users.   However, most airlines still don’t have a presence and many that do are using it sporadically and inconsistently.

We scanned through Instagram to look for 20 airline feeds so we could put together a comparative report.  In fact, even coming up with 20 airlines on Instagram wasn’t as straight-forward as we thought, as a number of major players are notable by their absence.

The infographic we’ve commissioned (see below) shows Air Asia leads in followers, bmibaby on activity and British Airways in likes.  It also throws up a few questions about how most airlines use Instagram and how they could use it more effectively.

To take a few feeds as examples:

• British Airways (@british_airways).   BA recently generated a fair amount of excitement on Instagram due to showing off the 787 Dreamliner.  In general, it uses it as a visual news feed.  Events, staff, planes, souvenirs and so on, which seems to be well received. The average number of likes is very high (an average of 250+ per post for the last ten), despite the feed having posted a little over 50x.  Clearly this is something BA could take advantage of, and make more of.
• Air Asia (@airasia) seems to use Instagram to try and get across the essence of the brand, via shots of the people who work there, including Airline boss Tony Fernandes.  It works – their Instagram account is very large (almost 15,000 followers) and they are extensively posted about on the network.
• Air France (@airfrance).  Air France’s Instagram account is a mix of everything – new routes, retro gear and destination pics.   At the end of last year, Air France also ran a #spotairfrance competition in the UK, France and Switzerland.   This was a competition for people to upload posts of their Air France experience, and tag them #spotairfrance. With 377 posts being submitted around the competition, Air France is still one of the few airlines to have used Instagram to encourage actual interaction from its followers via a competition or promotion.
• American Airlines (@americanair).   American Airlines posted sporadically until earlier this year, when it started uploading pictures of its new seats.   Since 7 March the feed has been quiet though.   Has there really been nothing to say at an airline as large as American for two months?

You’d be hard pressed to find Lufthansa, Alitalia or Iberia on Instagram, but you can find Russian airline Aeroflot (@aeroflot).  By and large the feed is made up of plane shots, but the fact that it posts fairly consistently already puts Aeroflot ahead of most other airlines on Instagram, and it deserves more than its 87 followers.

At Rabbit we’ve worked with both bmi and bmibaby, and this is what we did with their accounts:

We took on the bmi (@flybmi) feed earlier in the year with a brief to grow followers (at the time 200) and engagement and also to showcase destinations in line with the bmi Spring sale.   Edit challenges (take a master image and enhance it) are part of Instagram culture, and so we set up a weekly #bmieditchallenge around different destinations from Amman to Vienna.   We received almost 1000 posts in response, and grew the account five-fold to over 1000 followers.

bmibaby.  bmibaby may be the smallest airline on the list, but it is also the most active, having posted 228 times.

Our strategy was to use Instagram to showcase bmibaby destinations and also to build up relationships with influencers on the network.  As a result, we rolled out a six month campaign called My Europe, which resulted in over 35,000 destination photos being submitted, supplemented by Instagram inspired online destination guides and “insta-meets” (real world Instagram exchanges).

So what should airlines be doing?   A few things in particular:

1 – Make Instagram feeds dynamic rather than static.  With exceptions such as Air France, bmi and bmibaby, most airline Instagram feeds are one-way and don’t encourage fans to post their own images.   Encouraging engagement doesn’t always have to involve competitions or promotions.   A very simple thing airlines could do is to use the ‘repost’ function on Statigram (a web service linked to Instagram) to showcase a fan photo of the week – this is something we do for Gatwick Airport.

2 – Give the feed a theme.   What’s your Instagram feed for?   Most airline accounts are a mixed bagged and are a bit of everything.

Air Asia’s account works (and has amassed 15k followers) because a decision has clearly been taken to show the human side of the business – the staff.   Similarly, Aeroflot uses its feed to show off its planes and could probably quickly increase its following by tapping into the active ‘AV Geek’ community on social media.  Like with other social media channels, there needs to be a content strategy and plan.

3 – Look out for the quality of images. We noticed that a lot of airlines use their Instagram feeds a little like they would Twitpic – the photo service that allows you to attach images to tweets.   In fact, Instagram and other photo-sharing networks like Tadaa and Streamzoo have sold themselves on their in-app filters, which significantly enhance ordinary photos.   Again, a number of airlines seem to take care and attention with what they post, one example is SAS (@flysas)

4 – Be consistent.   Once you have created your Instagram account, have a content timetable and be consistent.   A few feeds we looked at had obviously created their Instagram account and then done nothing with it – in one high profile case since Christmas.   As with other social channels, you build engagement and follower by being visible and showing you are committed to the network and community.

The fact is Instagram and other up and coming photo sharing networks like Tadaa, Streamzoo and EyeEm can be powerful tools in an airline’s social media arsenal.   They can be very effective in sourcing good  user generated content, they can showcase destinations, they are good for visualising major news events and they are good for engaging a community that very often won’t be found on other social channels.

To end with, some more stats:  In the US and UK most mobile phones are now smartphones, with cameras as good as some entry level digital cameras.   In the USA, more smartphones (150 million) will sell than all cameras combined.   In the US, the % of pictures taken with a smartphone jumped from 17% in 2010 to 27% in 2011.   The most popular camera on Flickr has for a while now been the iPhone.   As an airline, your business is inherently visual.  Isn’t this a trend you should be taking advantage of?

• How BmiBaby Used Instagram to Visually Engage Travelers and Locals
• How airlines and airports can dramatically increase engagement on their Facebook Pages through one simple action
• Vote for the SimpliFlying Hero of April 2012: bmibaby vs JetBlue vs Virgin Atlantic
• What will bring Russian airline brands out of their slumber? In conversation with industry expert Stuart Barwood
• Airline brands must understand that social media is like a BBQ cookout party

Morgan Johnston leads JetBlue's social media efforts

JetBlue’s first jump into social media was after the ice-storm of February 2007 when they needed to address their customers to talk to them about lessons learned from an operational failure. They made the decision to address customers directly through YouTube and learned very quickly that establishing a direct relationship with customers through these channels was appreciated – and also provided an invaluable resource to learn more.

On the road to greatness

When Twitter began to gain additional prominence in March, JetBlue recognised the opportunity of the real-time nature of the medium. Because users were posting their experiences as they happened, the airline could talk with them as they were travelling. This offered amazing customer recovery opportunities

Morgan admits that while he loves the communities they’ve built, and the audience they’ve developed, the best aspect of their social strategy has nothing to with their accounts. The most important thing JetBlue did was use the networks to listen to what their customers were saying about them, and using that information to affect change internally.

While JetBlue doesn’t release information specifically on the revenue generated from social media activities, there are a number of metrics they watch regularly to measure success. One metric that they spend a great deal of time on is the engagement and sentiment of their customer base. NPS (Net Promoter Score) is a core metric at JetBlue and “the ability to refine what we know about our service through surveys, emails, and social media monitoring is incredible. Particular to social, our ability to track how online sentiment and knowledge is changed depending on our ability to communicate with the online audience is incredibly useful.”

Social Media and the Art of Crisis Management

When asked about the recent crisis with the indisposed pilot, Morgan says that like any carrier, JetBlue has plans developed for any number of situations. However, the specifics around the diversion of flight 191 to Amarillo, TX was a new and unexpected scenario for them.

It’s interesting to note that the first indication that this wasn’t a standard medical diversion came from a customer’s Tweet from the plane when it landed. Many of JetBlue’s plans anticipate customers tweeting from the scene, and they plan the scale of public responses as needed.

“Suffice it to say, there was a lot of interest about what happened to Captain Osbon, so we knew we needed to move fast. However, while we needed to move fast, we also take the responsibility of reporting only verified information very seriously, and also need to respect the privacy of our crewmembers and customers.”

A JetBlue pilot captain Clayton Osbon, is removed from the plane after erratic behavior forced the crew to land in Amarillo, Texas. Source: WINA.com

Their initial blog post – and the subsequent updates were all done with a desire to balance the established goal of transparency, and the customers’ desire for information, with the responsibility to be sensitive and accurate with information. As Morgan says, “… trust we have built over the years went a long way to make our customers more understanding of the situation.”

As for internal policies regarding what employees can utter online, Morgan says that JetBlue asks their crewmembers to be responsible with their communications online, be transparent about their affiliation, and put disclaimers where needed, and above all make it clear they’re accountable for what they say, and the promises they might make to customers in online spaces. “Past that, our social network policy boils down to, “don’t be stupid.” – and we’ve had pretty good success with that to date.”

Building a co-ordinated, responsive team

JetBlue’s Social Media team is lead by representatives from their internal teams representing Marketing, Corporate Communications, and Customer Commitment. They all work together on initiatives. As the advertising team works with their ad agency on campaigns, they also work to incorporate the social components of those into their strategy.

A distributed team handles their social media strategy. The front line of their monitoring and engagement is the Real Time Recovery team. This team consists of 21 part time crewmembers based within their Customer Commitment team in the Salt Lake City, Utah area. The team has responsibility over a number of things within their operation including answering customer emails, working with operations on real time customer recovery, working with special needs customers preparing for flights, and the 24/7 monitoring and customer engagement through social media.

The Real Time Recovery team is augmented by the Corporate Communications and Marketing teams that jump in when larger issues present themselves, or when particular messages need to be presented to customers. These three teams work together with equal authority over our strategy, keeping proper checks and balances in place.

JetBlue was one of the first companies to start actively using CoTweet when it came onto the scene, and have enjoyed being part of their evolution into SocialEngage. Morgan says that the integration of Twitter and Facebook into a dashboard that allows tracking, assigning, tagging of customer comments, and tracking of effectiveness of posts is perfect for their multi-unit social team. For Facebook, they also use Buddy Media and other third party app developers where appropriate.

The importance of experimenting, adapting and talking to customers

Social media is all about the conversation. Pitches and promotions, give-aways or contests, Morgans says, are all fun, but they can be done anywhere and they’re not necessarily social. The real advantage of social media is the ability to talk with your customers, learn from them and earn their trust by showcasing your employees’ humanity.

That trust is the real opportunity. It builds the good will you may need one day, and it builds the advocates and evangelists that will fight on your behalf and share your messages to their audiences.

“We made the mistake of pitching without first earning the trust, and our messages fell on deaf ears. It wasn’t until we asked our customers what they wanted of us, that we started building the relationship that would be the foundation of our social strategy.”

As for those looking to build their own social initiatives, Morgan has some handy tips. Collaborate with your customers to come up with the product that’s right for everyone. You have ideas of what you’d like to see for goals, and they’ll most certainly have ideas on what they’d like to see. Talk it out, experiment, adapt, and never get too attached to any one particular “right answer,” it may change overnight.

Well said, Morgan! We can’t wait to see more from JetBlue this year!

Know someone who’s worthy of being a SimpliFlying Hero?

Simpliflying Heroes are individuals recognized for outstanding social media use in the world of aviation. Do you know of somebody who uses social media effectively in their airline or airport to achieve specific business results? Or do you think you fit the bill?

Then go ahead and fill up the SimpliFlying Heroes nomination form. By filling out the nomination form, you bring them a step closer to being recognized by SimpliFlying for their efforts.

• Vote for the SimpliFlying Hero of April 2012: bmibaby vs JetBlue vs Virgin Atlantic
• Five ways airlines can tame Twitter – Jesse Engle of CoTweet shares his expertise
• How does JetBlue build a strong digital airline brand?
• Getting up, close and personal with the customer – three airline case studies
• Perfect storm: JetBlue versus Southwest on Twitter – real incident

Now that the adjustment period is over, we’ve decided to take a look at how airlines and airports have adjusted to the new layout and we’ve created this Top 10 deck featuring the Top 5 examples of Airline pages followed by the Top 5 Airport Pages.

During our research we were positively surprised by the quality of the work done by both airline and airport Facebook teams. However, sometimes we were disappointed to see how some companies appeared to be unaware of the change and had not adapted their Pages. Furthermore, especially on the airport side, we noticed that many companies had created beautiful cover images but had not filled their Timelines, leaving the very useful “milestone” feature almost unused.

Note: The airlines portion of this Top 10 was created adapting a guest post we wrote for Tnooz.

Loved this list? Think it could be better? Tell us in the comments. If you’re an airline or airport looking to fine-tune your Facebook strategy, drop us a line at contact@simpliflying to know more about how you can use Facebook to drive business goals.

• Eight steps to driving results for travel brands from the new Facebook timeline
• Love airlines just as much as branding and social media? Would you like to write a guest post for SimpliFlying?
• Top 10 Airports on Social Media – case studies of the airports best at driving engagement
• [Infographic] The first-ever insights into how airlines are using Google Plus
• Engaging the captive customer – Airlines and airports sitting on a gold mine of engagement opportunities

Since recently returning from the American Association of Airport Executive’s (Great Lakes Region) National Air Service Conference, my mind is buzzing about innovative ways that social media can be used to enhance an airport’s air service development efforts.

At the conference I moderated a panel that was focused on the importance of communicating to the generations and how social media has infiltrated into the air service spectrum of the industry. It is now more important than ever for airports to understand that the ways in which our passengers are communicating and understand that that has evolved to include social media. It is no longer enough to simply market a new route through traditional mediums;  social media needs to be at the forefront of the minds of airports as they are working to enhance air service.

Social Promotions and Route Launches

During the conference session, Justin Meyer, Manager of Air Service Development for the Kansas City International Airport shared how social media is not only changing the way the airport is communicating to passengers of all generations, but also about their recent efforts to launch new service on Alaska Airlines from MCI to Seattle, WA.  The airport had a pre-existing relationship with the carrier, which led to a member of  the staff being invited to fly out on the inaugural flight and tweet about the new service and cool promotion they were running.

Partnering with your airlines to help market a new route is not a new concept for airports, but using social media to enhance the reach is an area on which airports are beginning to place more of a focus.

So what are a few simple ways that an airport can use social media to leverage new or existing routes and possible help to develop new air service for their local communities?

Three ways to revolutionize airport marketing

1. Awareness through a Game – Leverage local community partners to spread the word of destinations through Facebook checki-ns.

   Click here to view the embedded video.

Take a look at what Air China recently embarked on to increase awareness in the Sweden of all the cool Asian destinations they serve.

In order to increase awareness in the Sweeden of the airline’s multiple Asian destinations, they partnered with local Sweeden businesses. While scope and location are always a factor before jumping into a strategy, we feel that airports can learn from this example and could benefit from a similar program.

2. The use of social media to push seat sales for both new and existing markets.
   Your airline partners are already doing it, so why not partner up with them to share the news with your local social followers and fans?  A quick email off to the marketing departments of each airline that serves your market, letting them know that you want to push specials, news, and deals through your social mediums can get an airport started on the right track to social success. 

   The Melbourne Airport created a special Twitter handle just for pushing seat sales. While the account is not very “interactive” with its followers, @MelbFlightDeals has given the airport a channel to share relevant information and deals with followers who are looking for deal specific information.
   

3. The use of social media to run social-based surveys aimed at route development.
   JetBlue recently showcased a fine example of communicating with travelers on how route decisions are made.  The social savvy team posted a simply survey, asking followers to vote of favorite destinations and paired it with an informative blog post about how the airline chooses cities. 

   Air service surveys are tricky, as the airport can not be certain if the info will be taken to heart by the airline they are hoping to woo, however, community engagement and participation are not to be taken lightly. Airports are often found in the position where they must work to convince an airline of the viability of a certain new market and community engagement is key in air service development.  By engaging the community through the survey and using it as a channel to also inform them of the importance of their support, this just could be a winning way for an airport to use social media in a fun new way.

   Step 1: Create a simple survey aimed at gathering information from your local passengers on travel preferences and needs.
   Step 2: Write a post to the community sharing with them how the process works and the importance of supporting the airport.

   These are just a few ways that airports can begin to use social media as a route development tool. What do you think?

   For more ideas your airport can use social media to engage your passengers, be sure to revisit our 4 Fun Ways Airports Can Drive Engagement Though Foursquare and Top 10 airports on social media or drop us a line at airports@simpliflying.com to learn more about how your airport can use social media to drive engagement and revenue.

• Simplinnovative Air Service Development Marketing by Penticton Airport to get Westjet service
• How BmiBaby Used Instagram to Visually Engage Travelers and Locals
• Thirty questions airline brands and airports must answer to build a strong social media strategy
• How BMI SimpliEngaged Customers with a Pinterest Visual Lottery
• Introducing the newly expanded SimpliFlying team, with special focus on community engagement and airport marketing

In many respects, Facebook takes the limelight when it comes to looking at how an airline is engaging with the community. However, over the past couple of years Twitter has inadvertently become the public helpdesk for brands around the world. Many airlines have been quick to establish a presence here to ensure that where ever there are questions and praise (and to some extent, complaints) a representative is there is respond in 140 characters.

US airlines, like many other US brands, have been quick to build their Twitter teams and are blazing a trail for many other global airlines to follow. SimpliFlying and Unmetric decided to dig a little deeper using the Unmetric platform to see if there is a clear leader or whether all airlines are doing a similar job. We collected and analyzed the data for the last thirty days to discover the benchmarks around which other airlines can compare themselves.

Volume of Tweets

JetBlue is often held up as the darling of Twitter but when it comes to raw number of Tweets, both DeltaAssist (Delta’s dedicated customer-service channel on Twitter) and American Airlines beat them hands down. The customer support channel for Delta handles more than twice the number of questions than JetBlue. In terms of raw numbers, all seven airlines sent a total of 11,398 tweets in the last 30 days – that’s an average of 16 tweets per hour.

Fingers on the Buzzers

The aviation industry has some of the best response times of any sector but blazing a trail for others to follow is Delta Assist. The Twitter team at Delta managed to respond to 4,235 questions in the last 30 days with an average response time of just 11 minutes. They’ve either got some speedy typers or an army of people with their fingers on the buzzers waiting to reply.

Both US Airways and United are using their Twitter accounts to provide customer support but are not able to match the likes of Delta and JetBlue at the moment. It’ll be interesting to keep an eye on their response times to see if it comes down in the next few months.

Round The Clock Service

Out of the seven airlines we analyzed, only JetBlue and Delta Assist appear to have 24/7 operations. We used EST as the reference time and when we aggregated all the tweets it produced the revealing graph below. Clearly for most airlines, their Twitter support is a 12 hour operation. It’s possible that the data is skewed a little bit because the airlines will have their Twitter teams in different timezones, but most seem to be operating between 9am and 6pm EST.

With US Airways’ 8 hour response time, it crossed my mind whether their operations are in the right timezone. If most of their customers are from the West coast they could have a long wait if they post in the afternoon as the Twitter team will have all gone home for the day.

A Tweet By Tweet Breakdown

It’s interesting to see that nearly all US airlines are using Twitter as a customer support channel rather than a platform to promote themselves. Only Virgin America and Southwest Air are actively putting fresh content out on Twitter while the other 5 are focused almost exclusively on replying to customers. Delta have gone down the same road as Dell with road of one account for brand news and one purely for support and with the volume of tweets they send it’s probably a good idea. As more and more brands create dedicated support accounts on Twitter it might only be a matter of time before JetBlue and American Air decide to set up their standalone ‘support’ account.

Most airlines certainly seem to know that in order to manage their reputation online they need to be where the conversations are happening. Delta Assist are, in our opinion, laying down the benchmark for the sector with their lightning quick response times while sending the most number of tweets. JetBlue has always been the poster child for brands that get Twitter, but if Delta Assist continues to set the benchmarks, we might have to hold up a new king of Twitter.

Find out more about how Unmetric can help your airline benchmark its social media prowess here. Or drop us a line directly at unmetric@simpliflying.com. Look out for even more exciting stuff from our collaboration with Unmetric in the days to come!

You can see previous posts by Unmetric here.

• Airlines on Twitter Monthly Report for July 2011 reveals that more airlines have Twitter accounts than loyalty programs
• Delta Assist brings airline customer service to Facebook
• How airlines and airports can dramatically increase engagement on their Facebook Pages through one simple action
• Airlines on Twitter Monthly Report for August 2011: Cebu Pacific joins the big league and scores high!
• Airlines on Twitter in June 2011: Delta Airlines is the breakaway “listening and talking champion”

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We’re back with the nominations for April’s round of SimpliFlying Heroes. Over a keenly contested set of three rounds, we’ve had three excellent winners for January, February and March. We’re sure this month’s nominations will be keenly contested as well! Here they are:

Julian Carr, Bmibaby

The British Airline Bmibaby’s recent initiatives, led by its MD Julian and The Rabbit Agency, hit Simpliflying’s headlines recently with an excellent visual initiative where it engaged Instagram communities by allowing some of their members to meet in person and take part in “photo walks” at various Bmibaby destinations. The campaign appears to be part of a larger off-airport engagement strategy that focuses on destination and location specific initiatives. Previously the airline organized city tours based on Gowalla check-ins and routes, as well as a Grand Tour of Europe initiative where participants were invited to check in trough gowalla at various of Bmibaby destinations.

Morgan Johnston, JetBlue

Not long after we released our Crisis Management Top 10, the social media team at JetBlue gave a great demonstration of just how important social media can be in a crisis.  When the pilot of a JetBlue flight had to be restrained in mid air by flight crews and passengers following a mental-breakdown, the airline immediately started replying to all incoming tweets, provided information and even set up a live-blogged it on the JetBlue Tales blog.  Furthermore, to avoid the spread of rumors the airline shared clear information from its blog, and on both Facebook and Twitter where it also purchased a sponsored tweet to keep the statement in a prominent position.

Kyle Thorne, Virgin Atlantic

Virgin Atlantic is one of those airlines that keeps surprising us with their social media initiatives and often gets featured on our SimpliFlying Top 10s. Today we have decided to nominate them for the airline’s continued efforts in creating environments where travelers can share experiences, and in particular for its latest effort: Travelreads. For this initiative the airline partnered with Longreads to create a curated library of travel-related reads that can be shared with users through a dedicated twitter channel and the #longreads tag. Furthermore this initiative fits nicely with the company’s vtravelled blog and the community of travelers that it has created.

May the best Hero win! As always, voting will close in 7 days from today (ie, 17 April 12 pm ET).

• How BmiBaby Used Instagram to Visually Engage Travelers and Locals
• How does JetBlue build a strong digital airline brand?
• Results announced: The SimpliFlying Hero for January 2012 is Pooja Dua of SpiceJet!
• Is social loyalty the next phase of development for frequent flyer programs?
• For leading JetBlue to social media stardom, Morgan Johnston is the SimpliFlying Hero of April 2012

With about a day still to go for voting (and trust us, a lot of votes come in on the last day), the total number of votes has already crossed 30,000. Moreover, votes have come in from 4500+ cities across the world. How incredibly awesome is that?

1. Freshness and innovativeness are the keywords you need to keep in mind if you wish to drive a really successful social media campaign.
2. If you’re able to engage the interest of the customer, it’s possible to overcome certain price-point barriers. e.g. KLM’s new Economy Comfort option was a hit due to the viral video of a levitating magician.
3. People are looking for instant engagement online – if you’re looking to provide customer service online, don’t do it half-heartedly. Throw everything you’ve got into it and your customers will appreciate you for it. eg. AirAsia’s AskAirAsia.
4. To a certain extent, building emotional bonds with customers will drive long-term loyalty and revenue. eg. KLM Surprises and JetBlue’s glass half-full video.
5. Being “controversial” or disruptive is also a great way of driving buzz, receiving eyeballs and getting new customers as long as it is done right. eg. Air New Zealand have been brilliant in their “provocative” social media endeavours such as “Nothing to hide” etc.
6. Leverage the latest technology as and when it becomes available to engage more customers and to appear to be at the cutting-edge of innovativeness. eg. the Chrome web app by Virgin America, Groupon route-launches etc.

With that said, here’s the case-pack. We hope you enjoy going through it!

• The Best Airlines Driving Revenue Through Social Media – Introducing the Top 5 nominees for the 2nd SimpliFlying Awards for Social Media Excellence
• Best Airports in Social Media: Top 5 Airports nominated for the SimpliFlying Awards for Social Media Excellence 2011
• The Best Airlines Driving Customer Service & Crisis Management Through Social Media: Top 5 SimpliFlying Awards nominees
• SimpliFlying-Airline Business Awards for Social Media Excellence for Airlines – Vote now!
• 2nd Annual SimpliFlying Awards in Social Media Excellence – Vote NOW for best airlines, airports, hotels

The Turning Tide

Undoubtedly, social media offers many benefits versus traditional forms of engagement. Some of them do bear repetition: the near-instant form of communication; two-way interaction compared to broadcast messaging; the ability to spread messages very fast across networks; the potential to identify and target “brand advocates” to drive brand awareness in cults (see Cult Relationship Management). We’ve strived to point out that a presence on social is media is not sufficient to do wonders for the brand: given that almost every airline is now on social media (our Monthly Airlines on Twitter report offers some numbers) brands must not only differentiate themselves but also focus their efforts on driving specific business goals. If they don’t, they’ll be relegated to the backwaters of social media.

It turns out that our ceaseless advice and suggestions have not gone unheeded. More airlines than ever before are now using social media as a platform to drive business goals such as crisis management (see our recent case-study on Delta Airlines), revenue (examples abound in our Top 10 series) and now, a much more challenging aim, to drive loyalty via social media.

You should create a loyalty initiative for your airline too!

The challenge in creating a social loyalty initiative is that you really need to be sure of what will click with customers. After all, the goal is to increase loyalty which requires reciprocation from the customers. The good thing is that there are potentially infinite ways (if you’re imaginative enough) of creating a successful initiative. What you need to keep in mind is that most customers will become more loyal based on two things: rewards or recognition (or both).  Our case-pack will illustrate the diverse ways in which this is being done by some of the major airline across the world.

The benefits of creating a successful social loyalty initiatives are manifold:

1. A brand advocate with a strong social network could act as a huge multiplier for your loyalty efforts by getting members from his network involved with the brand.
2. There is a huge opportunity to move away from traditional loyalty programmes and offer something disruptive and innovative.
3. Loyal customers are worth more than new customers (this is true for traditional loyalty programmes as well).
4. The biggest benefit: there is very little lag between implementation and measurement. The results can be seen very quickly indeed.

Without further ado, we present to you our list of the Top 10 Social Loyalty Initiatives by Airlines.

What did you think of this list? Felt we left out someone? Felt this was perfect and want to reward us for our efforts?

We’d love to hear your thoughts! Do join in the discussion and tweet us @simpliflying.

• Is social loyalty the next phase of development for frequent flyer programs?
• [Presentation] Why the future of loyalty programs will be social-media based
• Five Reasons for low cost airlines to take loyalty seriously
• “Crowdbranding”: The Top 10 Crowdsourcing initiatives by Airlines
• KLM reaffirms its social media leadership with its innovative Stewardess Yourself app

Somewhere else on Twitterland, Christi Day of Southwest Airlines was dealing with an outburst from @TheKevinSmith, on Valentine’s Day eve, which finally involved Southwest’s VP calling Smith personally.

Though these may seem like normal twitter conversations, to me they reflect a paradigm shift in the way airlines have started to deal with their customers. It wasn’t too long ago, where I had to print out and post a letter to an airline for a missed-connection claim, because their email inbox was full! And the matter took over 5mths to get resolved (in the end, I didn’t get my $$).

JetBlue and Southwest have both been beacons of change in the industry, and they’ve shown a more human side of airlines – generally considered faceless corporations. Kudos to their efforts to connect with the customer directly, and truly listen. I think it shows where the future of customer service is heading.

What do you think? Has your favorite airline been listening to you lately?

• JetBlue says “sorry”. And we love them even more, for being a human brand
• Why do I regret having never flown Southwest? It’s the humor!
• A Southwest Airlines employee goes out of her way to help a distressed passenger
• Making ancillary revenue work with brand strategy – my interview
• United Airlines brand may go for a spin as customer feedback line is terminated

You do realize that it’s the in-flight experience that makes or breaks a customer relationship, right? How do you make their in-flight experience an unforgettable one using social media? And then how do you get them to talk about it? Well, here are 5 ways to do that:

1. Use a unique Hashtag for the flight

Aim: Improve customer experience

Why not include a hashtag for each flight number with the booking confirmation? It can be something simple, such as #0311JB1263 (March 11th, Jet Blue flight #1263). That way, when people send a tweet saying they just booked a flight, or are heading to the airport, they use that hashtag, and then can search for others using the same hashtag. Passengers can make their own arrangements to meet up at the gate, share a cab to the airport, or chat during the flight. They will feel much more connected to fellow travelers, if they would like to be.

2. Give freebies to those to “talk” about you

Objective: Increase word of mouth, improve customer experience

In order to encourage passengers to talk about your airline, you can run a small promotion before take-off. If they tweet or update their Facebook status and include your airline name, they will win one of 5 drinks being awarded, or pillows, or blankets – whatever you’d otherwise charge for. In order to be eligible, they must use your Twitter handle or “tag” you in their Facebook update. Winners will be selected at random before the flight takes off, so that electronics are still in use, and the drink can be awarded during flight.

3. Seating Charts with Twitter IDs

Objective: Increase word of mouth, improve customer experience

Why not give passengers the ability to see fellow passengers’ Twitter IDs when selecting their seats when booking or during checkin?  They may choose to sit near (or avoid!) someone based on their profile or tweets.  For those who like to network, this will increase their opportunity to do so.  And, most assuredly, they will tweet about the experience, giving you more word of mouth.

Note: Obviously this would need to be an opt-in service, which could be accomplished easily using Twitter’s OAuth system. Or if you want to avoid the trouble, just add in a field in the booking path, asking the passenger for his Twitter id

4. In-flight chat rooms if you have wi-fi on-board

Objective: Improve customer experience

Why not set up a chat room for Twitter users using TweetChat so they can chat during flight.  Not only will this give them something to do, and interact with other passengers, but you will undoubtedly get some marketing research at the same time.  They’ll talk about the food, the seats, the flight attendants, etc.  You can also set up a private chat room through Facebook, but that will take more technical expertise.

5. “Check-in” on FourSquare, not just onto the flight

Objective: Increase word of mouth, improve customer experience

Location based services, such as FourSquare, Gowalla and MyTown are the latest craze in social media.  Users “check-in” at stores, buildings, offices when they arrive.  Why not offer a bonus for checking in at your airline with one of these services?  Maybe advanced seating, a free drink free headphones or wireless access.

What other ideas do you have to improve customer experience using social media? Let’s hear them out

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