It's only the twits who are now failing to tweet

Is social media a toy or great free marketing tool? Steve Nichols looks at how it is being handled by different airlines.

Getting your company to fully make use of social media is easy isn’t it? All you have to do is send out a few tweets on Twitter and have a Facebook account. Oh, and while you are at it, make sure the chief executive has a blog – written by someone else obviously.

Well, no! It takes more than this, but the rewards can be substantial as many airlines are finding out.

According to a Socialbakers’ study, airlines are the second most “socially-devoted” industry on Facebook.

It showed that airline brands on Facebook received 30,000 questions from their fans over a three-month period. From March 1–May 30 2012, their global Facebook pages answered up to 55% of the 30,000 questions posted by their customers and fans to their walls.

KLM became one of the first airlines to integrate social networking into its flight process. KLM passengers can link their Facebook or LinkedIn profiles to their flight through “Meet & Seat” to see who else is on board and eventually choose who they want to sit next to. Business travellers apparently like using the system for networking purposes.

Virgin America has also embraced social media and has run promotions using social media platforms as diverse as Twitter, Foursquare, Loopt, Groupon and Klout.

Virgin also looks for ways to reward its audience. In 2010 the airline partnered with Klout to provide free flights to Twitter “influencers” – people who make waves in social media, convince them your brand is great, and tell their large audiences why they should fly Virgin.

But what about the Middle East region?

Royal Jordanian had a different approach to social media when it launched its new Facebook and Twitter channels in May 2011. It rounded up 20 of the top bloggers and Twitter users (or “tweeps”) in the country and put them on a Royal Jordanian Airbus A320 aircraft to “meet and tweet”.

The guests began tweeting for their chance to win prizes and free airline tickets. The result was that more than 1,500 tweets went out with the “#RJLaunch” hashtag, resulting in more than 1,200 new followers (which has since grown to more than 18,000). The event also generated major international news coverage.

Diya Murra, the project manager working on Royal Jordanian Airlines’ social media strategy said that it was talking directly with its passengers in a new hip way – “their way!”

“We want to overcome the traditional ‘corporate/customer’ relationship and to build them on a more personal level. We want a place where we can engage on a daily basis and find solutions to passengers’ enquiries and questions in a timely manner and develop long-lasting relationships with them,” he said.

For Facebook, Royal Jordanian has used the minimal amount of advertising and was surprised that it exceeded its benchmarks.

“During the process we found that Jordanians are big believers and huge fans of Royal Jordanian. Also, the campaigns, promotions, and constant updates and posts get us great fan growth.

“On Twitter all of our followers were acquired organically. Nevertheless, we have used campaigns and promotions that significantly increased the number of followers (eg: #RJLaunch Tweetup and #RJTwinter).

“Engaging and jumping into conversation pro-actively also helped us get great numbers. We try our best to keep our social media channels relevant to the fans – what’s going on in the region from events online and offline. We also run promotions and competitions to keep the fans entertained and the buzz going,” Diya said.

He added that one of Royal Jordanian’s strengths was that it does its best to answer any questions within 60 minutes, even if it’s only by touching base with the fan/follower. Currently, it is scoring an average response time of 12 minutes since the start of 2012.

In terms of social media tools it uses ContentScorer for Twitter – an in-house tool created by its agency, The Online Project, to track the performance of the tweets. This is still in its beta version.

“None of this could’ve happened without our management’s belief and support in the power of social media and The Online Projects’ capabilities,” Diya added.

One of the finalists of the 3rd Simpliflying Awards for Excellence in Social Media, held in Amsterdam in October, was Saudi Arabia’s nasair. The airline was launched in the kingdom in 2007 and operates more than 550 weekly flights to 24 destinations.

With more than 360,000 Facebook and 26,000 Twitter followers the company also makes big use of e-mail and mobile websites to get its message across. It has built its social media strategy around three premises – engagement, trust and empathy. It doesn’t use gimmicks like games or social loyalty apps and also ensures that social media is integrated with its e-mail campaigns.

All its promotions and offers are synchronised with Facebook and Twitter for maximum effect and its Facebook and Twitter URLs are also prominent on all printed media – even on boarding cards.

It also runs competitions on Facebook with the chance to win prizes like free flights. These often attract more than 4,000 entries a day. As many of the prizes (excluding nasair tickets) are sponsored by other companies, the total cost of each competition is marginal.

Akram Husain, interactive marketing director, nasair, said: “We never consider competitions as an effective marketing tool. These competitions are done to build trust.

“They are done in such an effective and transparent manner that they become the talk of the town. The way we reach out with our winners creates stories by themselves in the community, which gives us a very strong word-of-mouth reach. Marketing becomes a by-product of these competitions.”

One important addition is that all nasair winners are announced within 24 hours of the competition closing and winners get their photograph displayed on Facebook – how more social can your media get?

Akram added: “We started our Facebook journey in January 2012 with 7,000 fans but currently we are reaching almost 360,000. Aligning our social media goals with business objectives is the most important aspect of our strategy – it revolves around customers, fans, followers and subscribers.”

The airline also received the “Best Interactive Award” from the Pan Arab Awards Academy in Amman recently. This was the first time the airlines category was added under Facebook application awards.

Akram said the airline proudly dedicated this award to nasair customers and fans. He promised continued growth with more appealing promotions and competitions.

And if you thought that Facebook was a flash in the pan, nasair’s figures show otherwise. In the first six months of this year its e-mail marketing database grew by 243%. But in the same period its Facebook use saw a phenomenal 4,526% growth.

There is obviously something about Facebook as Twitter usage over the same period only grew by 129%, and mobile website usage “only” 345%.

Akram said: “Social media at nasair is directly responsible for a more than 300% increase in referral traffic to our website, which in turn resulted in conversion.”

And all this exposure is being reflected in the results. In May, CEO Francois Bouteiller said the carrier was profitable “from an operational perspective” and the airline “enjoyed” a good 1Q2012. The carrier reported its second consecutive month of net profit for the first time in July 2012. Its net result for June 2012 was $3.8 million, followed by a $10.9 million profit in July 2012.

Gulf Air has had a similar experience. Shehab Saeed, senior manager marketing for Gulf Air, said that it views social media as a long-term investment.

“Hypothetically speaking, when we have a fan base of a few million followers or friends, then we can reduce our marketing budget,” he said.

“We would have built a means of communicating directly with customers or a target segment that is highly relevant to our business. With that kind of critical mass built up one could argue that even to obtain new customers the need for going to traditional media will be much less since the networking effect of friends recommending friends would be enough to sustain growth in the market share … all hypothetically speaking of course.”

Gulf Air was one of the first companies in the region to establish a strong social media presence, recognising the opportunity it created to network, attract passengers, recruit, promote the brand and market services, with minimal financial outlay.

“We are investing in manpower and technical innovations to strengthen our social media and this is a trend that we foresee continuing,” said Saeed.

“Currently Gulf Air’s business-to-consumer social media strategy is strong. Next year we plan to focus aggressively on business-to-business social media environments.

“Another key focus for us is education, both internally and externally. Externally we will continue to drive the benefit of social media in a bid to challenge the popular regional perception that it is merely a socialising tool.

“Internally we plan to explore the possibility encouraging employees to become more active in the social media arena in order to leverage this mass untapped resource. I definitely see social media taking up a larger share of our marketing efforts year-on-year.”

But what is Gulf Air's secret – what does it offer people that draws them in and keeps them happy?

“Engagement, engagement, engagement,” Saeed said. “People want information; they want to feel that when they do speak there is someone there to listen and respond.

“The key has been to maintain a high level of activity across all platforms of social media, offer promotions and information that can only be received or at least received first by your followers and fans, and finally ensure that when someone is critical of us or our product we respond swiftly.”

Gulf Air also finds Facebook a useful tool. “It gives us more than one means of communicating in a more comprehensive way,” Saeed said. “Twitter is a no-nonsense channel that customers go to get the salient points on any given topic. So although both are important I would say Facebook takes the lead due to the fact that it allows us to do so much more ‘face to face’ with the customer.”

Airlines pay scant attention to their social media strategies at their peril, as witnessed by United Airlines.

In July 2008 Dave Caroll travelled with his band “Sons of Maxwell” to Nebraska for a one-week tour, but the singer’s guitar was severely damaged by United baggage handlers. He wasn’t compensated, even after nine months of campaigning.

He was so frustrated that he decided to write and produce a song about his experience called “United Breaks Guitars”. It instantly became an internet viral hit – but it took United Airlines a whole week to react to the video, causing a 10% decrease in its stock price, not to mention the humiliation caused by more than 12 million YouTube views to date.

United has a habit of dropping the ball. In August Bob Sutton, a Stanford professor who writes about management and organisations, related on his blog how friends of his had sent their 10-year-old daughter unaccompanied on United to summer camp, assured by the airline that it would take good care of her.

But the girl missed her connection in Chicago – apparently because the airline employees who were supposed to help her failed to show up.

When the girl asked for help from other employees, they allegedly told her several times that they were too busy. And the parents only found out about it hours later, when the summer camp called to say their daughter had never arrived. When they called United, they were put on hold for 40 minutes, then told that the whole situation was no big deal.

The girl eventually turned up but it was only after the parents contacted a local TV station that United got serious about apologising and addressing their concerns, according to Sutton.

Sutton’s blog post struck a chord on Twitter and Facebook and, as it circulated, others began to add their own tales of United woe. United’s own Facebook page and Twitter feed then became a melting pot for their anger.

It just shows how one or two unhappy customers can have a negative impact on a business when it doesn’t deliver decent customer care – or have a decent social media policy.