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The use of metrics in social media can be misleading, as was the use of Internet Marketing metrics before them. A case in point would be the total number of page views – which may sound exciting, but we learned that if the bounce rates were high and leads were not captured and acted upon with a planned process – the page views to conversions or sales were a total disconnect.
Gaining Attention – Reaching Passengers Actively
In airport social media metrics it’s clearly not solely about the numbers either. If messages are going “unopened” or “unseen”, what difference does it make if how many Facebook Fans or Followers on Twitter there are?
There is another key to metrics that really opens up opportunity tracking, and that is that the medium is multi-channel and multi-dimensional. If your airport’s messaging (any type of value in the message) is relevant and timely to passengers, then the velocity of the message and its reach grows exponentially. This growth happens when messages get commented on, forwarded, Re-Tweeted and most importantly – recommended to others. The value of Peer Rating and Word of Mouth cannot be over emphasized!
For airports, if you’re listening and engaging with your passengers in meaningful ways, social media works extremely well. You’ll achieve “movement on the needle that is meaningful”. This in terms of direct impact on the airport’s 3 Goals: revenue, cost reduction and passenger CUSAT upsides.
Some simple benchmarks for adding social media to the marketing mix
Benefits and Appropriate Measurement
Passenger self help -> Reduction in call center traffic, web searches for information
Passenger response time -> Tracking reductions in CUSAT measures (average response times)
Mobile engagement -> Reduction in website searching, call center traffic (offloaded to SM traffic on mobiles)
Beyond the Followers
Simple metrics like Twitter Followers help you understand how many people have, at one time, found and likely viewed your messages. However, an airport must look beyond the obvious to understand the level of meaningful customer engagement they are having. It requires you to look beyond just Followers to extended concepts:
- How many Followers have Re-Tweeted your messages?
- How many Followers to they each have?
- How many of those Followers ReTweeted?
As can be seen unfolding, a simple, meaningful and timely Tweet can cause a cascading effect. It’s mathematically wondrous, but with a couple of caveats – are you getting machine exposure or real human exposure to the ReTweets? Just like counting page views, you don’t know if it’s just a lot of robots hitting your web pages or people who found you via search.
In a pure communications mode, you might not care if you see a trend in reduction of repeated web searches. It could be passengers hastily searching your airport directory, news items or information they need immediately for decision making. This could result in a reduction in calls to call services for the same information they seek.
If we assume that passengers will opt for inbound news finding them, airports had better tune their communications to make this a reality.
In an airport marketing application, retail for example, you should be more interested in passenger comments, ratings and re- tweets of your retail offers. This could have a positive impact on your non-aeronautical retail revenue stream.
Measuring this will be discussed in the next post – Measuring Influence.