Top U.S. Airlines: Who’s Flying Highest on Twitter?

Didit Editorial

11 years ago

By Steve Baldwin | April 15, 2014

Which Top U.S. Airline is using Twitter most effectively? Which has the strongest follower base, the biggest share of voice, and is most effective in enlisting their flying customers as Twiitter Followers?

We fired up Didit’s Social Media Analyzer tool to find some answers.

Background: Top 10 U.S. Airlines

The airlines have long recognized the value of using social media to communicate with their customers, apprising them of new routes, deals on tickets, sneak peeks at new aircraft, and to manage customer relations. Each of them has active Twitter accounts (in fact several have multiple accounts to serve one or more of the above functions). Each also maintains a presence on the Web, and on Facebook (Web and Facebook metrics are not part of this survey, which focuses just on Twitter).

The Top U.S. Airlines, ranked by total number of emplaned passengers, are (in order or rank), Delta, United, Southwest, American, JetBlue, Alaska Airlines, Air Canada, Frontier, Spirit, and Aeromexico. (see Figure 1). As you can see from Figure 1, the “big 4” (Delta, United, Southwest and American) carried the lion’s share (80 percent) of air passengers, with smaller carriers JetBlue, Alaska, Air Canada, Frontier, Spirit, and Aeromexico dividing the remaining 20 percent among themselves.

Top U.S. Airlines: Twitter Followers
Each of the airlines we surveyed has built sizable online audiences over the years on Twitter. When we began our survey, we expected that airline size would correlate directly with Twitter Followers, given that larger organizations have more resources to carry out social media audience-building efforts, and more passengers available to recruit as Twitter Followers.

But the results were at odds with our initial expectations. As you can see from Figure 2, scrappy JetBlue (accounting for only about 4.5 percent of passengers emplaned, has more than 31 percent of total Twitter followers, followed by Southwest, Delta, American, and United (“the big four”). Obviously, JetBlue is serious — very serious — about using Twitter for its marketing and CRM — arguably more serious than any other U.S. airline.

Top U.S. Airlines: Follower to Customer Ratio (FCR)
But total Twitter Followers alone don’t tell the complete story of which U.S. Airline has the strongest presence on Twitter. For this, we needed to postulate a new metric: FCR (Follower to Customer Ratio), which normalizes each airline’s customer base to provide a fairer estimate of comparative social media strength. Again, JetBlue wins the prize, effectively recruiting more than 6 percent of its customer base to engage with the airline on Twitter. But smaller carrier Aeromexico also does very well, recruiting more than 4 percent of emplaned passengers to Twitter followers.

Top U.S. Airlines: TweetShare and TweetRate
The Top 10 U.S. Airlines accounted for about 1.3 million total tweets, with the “big four” airlines accounting for 76 percent of the total. Here, Tweetshare more directly correlates with airline industry rank and total number of emplaned passengers (Figure 4).

In terms of TweetRate (the rate at which Tweets are posted to a given airline’s Twitter URL), however, the award goes to Air Canada, which Tweeted out a remarkable 138 Tweets — or 4.6 tweets per day – in the past 30 day period.

Top U.S. Airlines: Conclusion
So Which U.S. Airline is making the most of Twitter? Well, Jetblue easily breezes past the other, bigger carriers when it comes to total Twitter Followers, and also in terms of FCR (Follower-to-Customer Ratio). In terms of Tweets, American, with 511,000 Tweets, easily wins the “raw Tweet tonnage” award. Scrappy Air Canada flies away with our Fastest Tweeter award, delivering more than 138 action-packed messages in the past month.

The Didit Social Media Winner’s Circle: