Editor’s note: This is a guest post by UK-based Dirk Singer from The Rabbit Agency, which is the creative force behind BMI’s rise on Instagram.

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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 …

KLM are currently the undisputed champions of using social media to drive engagement. They won our Best Airline in Social Media award last year, have one of the Best Facebook Timelines, allow you to sit next to your Facebook friend, and even dress up like one of their flight attendants! Their VP of eCommerce says that airline marketing is up for an overhaul, and they’re leading the way. But we all know they put a lot of time, people and money behind their efforts (see study).

So, if you had one tenth the resources that KLM has and no budget, what can you learn from them to drive insane engagement? Play destination hangman with your Facebook fans! It’s similar to what you played as a kid in school, just featuring your airline’s destinations. Simple!

We had recently shared that one of the best Facebook Engagement strategies is “Fill in the blank”. Destination hangman is like putting this strategy on steroids!

How does it work? Let’s see how KLM does it. It’s a simple three step process:

Put up a nice photo of one of your destinations on your Facebook wall
In the caption, ask people to guess …

A few weeks ago we published an article reviewing the new Facebook Timeline for brands and taking a look at how its new features could be used by airlines.  When that article was published 27 of the 30 days of the facebook adjustment period had already passed, and few airlines had made the switch.

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.

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What’s the key to engaging customers in this time and age? For Martijn van der Zee, senior vice president of e-commerce at Air France KLM, the answer is simple: Get with the times, embrace failure and always listen to what your customers tell you.

We recently recorded a podcast with Martijn in which he shares some exclusive tidbits about KLM’s secrets to social media success: you can buy it at a special price of $19 here.

Late last year, a group of executives gathered for a social media presentation at a conference held in the Netherlands. Among the attendees was Martijn van der Zee, senior vice president of e-commerce at Air France KLM, who had with him a slide from a new initiative they were experimenting with. Little did he know how popular it would be at the conference – and on the Internet. Shortly after his presentation, the slide found its way online and became a viral hit, attracting millions of viewers worldwide.

The name of the initiative? Meet and Seat, a service that lets you use either Facebook or LinkedIn to view the profiles of other passengers on the same flight and choose your seat partner. The service …

The third episode of SimpliFlying Podcasts features KLM’s Vice President for e-commerce Martijn Van Der Zee who explains the secrets behind the airline’s constantly innovative social media strategy and their latest, potentially game-changing KLM meet and seat social-seating initiative.

The interview is preceded, as usual, by a free industry insights section where SimpliFlying’s CEO Shashank Nigam and Community Engagement Manager Marco Serusi discuss the latest industry news, focusing on the Singapore air show and the marked shift in power from Europe to Asia.

You can listen to the free version below (industry insights) or subscribe to it on our iTunes channel:

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Update: Voting is now closed. Tero Taskila of Estonian Air won by a landslide. Look out for a full feature on his leadership at Estonian Air very soon!

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Two months into the year and we’ve already had a venerable roster of social-media stars from airlines fight it out for our monthly Heroes award. Last month’s SimpliFlying Hero – Mohd Hisham from Malaysia Airlines – had many wonderful tidbits about how his team at MAS functions and how they “do” social media at MAS. You can read it here if you haven’t done so already.

Let’s cut to the chase, then. We’re ready for another round of voting – and I’m assuming you’re all familiar with this year’s revamped SimpliFlying Heroes initiative. We’re nominating three distinguished people from three airlines that have gained a formidable reputation as social media stars. Voting is open to all – and will close in 7 days from now (ie, Tuesday 13th March, 12 pm Pacific Time). Winners, as usual, will get a Certificate of Appreciation from SimpliFlying, an extended profile on our site and a shot at a wildcard entry into this year’s SimpliFlying Social Media Awards.

This time around you’ll notice that SAS has …

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Peter Claridge of Unmetric, an exclusive aviation partner of SimpliFlying. Unmetric is a social media benchmarking company that helps brands analyse how well they’re doing on social media by including in-depth insights into numerous metrics as well as information on what kind of content “works” and how competitors are faring. Among its clients are Citibank, Nestle and AirTel. Look out for even more exciting stuff from our collaboration with Unmetric in the days to come.

With interesting posts, quirky social media campaigns, more fans, higher fan growth rates and a whole lot of social media love, KLM are the undisputed European kings of social media for airlines. Their latest campaign, encouraging people to ‘stewardess’ themselves (Ryan Air take note: you can use stewardesses, get huge publicity and not have to resort to innuendo) and in the process got well over 55,000 new fans in just 7 days, encouraged people to share their snaps and invite their friends to try it out for themselves.

The campaign itself is a lot like past social media campaigns like Yearbook Yourself where you take a photo and it digitally inserts it in to a scene and …

Malaysia Airlines, for quite some time now, has been a star on social media. They’ve received a fair bit of coverage on SimpliFlying in the past year or two for the excellent work they’ve done, and were, notably, one of the finalists in the SimpliFlying Social Media Awards 2011 for their MHBuddy initiative. Not surprisingly, when we chose them as one of the three big guns to vote for in the February round of SimpliFlying Heroes, Malaysia Airlines (MAS) trumped Finnair and Delta despite stiff competition from them. We reached out to Hisham, who is Head of Social Media and Innovation and the star behind MAS’s social media efforts, and he was kind enough to oblige us with some juicy tidbits about the story of the airline’s rise as a major social-media presence.

As Hisham says, it’s hard to imagine not having a social media channel nowadays, but only a few years ago, when brands were still floundering on social media, Malaysia Airlines, after cosying up in social media, set some clear objectives: to stay in touch with their customers and to understand their preferences so that MAS …

The guys at KLM just don’t rest, do they? Over the past year or two, they’ve churned out some of the most excellent social media initiatives designed to delight and engage customers while ensuring that they’re firmly in sight of ultimate business objectives such as driving revenue and loyalty as well.

KLM is well known for its social media initiatives, but the speed and quality of their campaigns is really starting to become something unique. Just a few days ago we reported about their “Meet and Seat” social-seating initiative and now they’ve surprised us again by creating a fun, and very shareable, initiative that will surely help create new positive associations with their brand. Read on:
Ever dreamed of becoming a stewardess? Or of dressing up as one?
Well, personally I haven’t, but since it’s Carnival, I decided to accept a fun assignment by trying out KLM’s latest initiative: their “Stewardress Yourself“ Facebook app. Eventually, I ended up taking some rather embarrassing (but admittedly entertaining) pictures of me as a SimpliStewardess.

The initiative has been launched trough a dedicated tab in KLM’s facebook page that houses a unique Facebook app designed to bring customers even closer to the brand. This is how …

First, a bit of history. Social seating goes back a long time at SimpliFlying. We were actually the first to point out that choosing potential seating partners via an intelligent social seating system in an airplane would ultimately go mainstream – that was a product powered by our good friends at Satisfly. This was way back in 2009 – almost three years ago! Then in 2010, we discussed incorporating social media in the flying experience – and showcased Twitter seating charts.

Then, last year, there were significant indications of things to come with Malaysia Airlines allowing customers to sit next to their Facebook friends. However, a couple of months ago KLM announced that they would launch the first “truly” social seating system for airlines matching customer’s social profiles with those having similar profiles or interests.

So far, given the lack of details about how the system would exactly work, the announcement was both welcomed as well as met with trepidation by the online community. Some claimed they’d love to try this new system, saying that it would spare them long hours of boredom …