With different approaches to social media, which airline do you think will win today's social media media battle?
Virgin America
First up, Virgin America. Virgin is the more experimental of the two brands and it really uses pictures to share the experience of Virgin America. The Twitter background page is an image that makes you feel like you're in the passenger seat with a view from the back to the front of the plane and Virgin uses the same image for its cover photo on Facebook. It also uses Pinterest and Instagram to share photos from airplane geekery to events and encourages its customers to share photos of their own experiences as well.
One thing Virgin America does stress, is that it won't address specific guest service issues on Twitter (or Facebook). What it clearly provides in its bio is the contact details customers can use to get the help they need. Virgin America provides both a link directly to its contact us page and its customer service number. This doesn't mean the Virgin social media team don't respond to people who need customer service but they often encourage customers to go directly to customer service when they can.
If you search for @virginamerica, the sentiment is neutral to positive. Either it just provides a good experience as an airline or people are getting what they need online/ are going directly to customer service offline. The nameless team behind Virgin America are on Twitter and Facebook 7 days a week and actually tweet the most on Sundays according to the numbers below. It makes perfect sense as that's when most of us fly.
What is useful for me as a customer or potential customer, is that I can go directly to Virgin America's homepage and its main social networks are listed on the top of the page. You can also click through to a social media page where Virgin America stresses what they do on each social network and how you can take part. Twitter and Facebook are also embedded so you can see what people are saying right now.
United Airlines
Now onto their competitor, United Airlines. Now United used to be very proactive about announcing their social media presence on their flights and on their website. Now if you go to their homepage, you can't find an easy link to their social networks. They instead seem to be focusing on their own customer centre, the United Hub, where they are planning to pull all their social networks into one place where they will encourage customers to go to interact with them. At this current moment though, there is nothing there to show what people are saying nor are there links to where you can comment. It's a bit like they've put up a construction shell stating "coming soon" with no indication of when it's opening its doors to the public
Though United states that Facebook and Twitter aren't for customer service issues, these messages aren't signposted very well. United include a message on the background image on Twitter and the about section in Facebook (if you click through to it) but it's not the first thing you see. Most customers won't go looking for instructions. They want to be told up front.
As for engagement, they don't engage on social networks on the weekend and though the United social team answer quite a few questions, when you search for @united on Twitter the majority of comments appear to be negative. Its lack of customer service has been a thing of much publicity from United Breaks Guitars to it's most recent issues in March when United merged its booking system with Continental so this isn't a surprise. What is a surprise is why Unite haven't become more savvy and been proactive about dealing with its customers online. Unfortunately, the complaints won't go away unless you do something about it.
United do have a strong community on airline forums (some may eat you alive if you post a negative comment on there) but the positive customer forces may be diminishing as United continues to have troubles outside of social media and lacks the support to manage the issues that are cropping up online.
What the numbers mean
According to the infographic by Visual.ly below, Virgin America has a significantly higher number of followers, almost three times ass many in fact. Not that high numbers mean a lot with big brands but it could be because they do tweet on a regular basis and not just to follow up with customers. Virgin also follows a high number of its customers, probably so the Virgin team can DM them about any customer service issues they may have.
United, on the other hand, have a large number of mentions but as we pointed out earlier, the majority of the mentions United have lean toward negative issues rather than positive interactions with the brand. As it is deathly quiet on the social front on the weekend, the time a large number of people fly, this is not a good move toward fixing its negative customer service issues nor do United seem to really want to connect with us as its Twitter bio claims it wants to do.
The results
Sorry to say it United Airlines, but you've been had. Virgin America wins hands down.
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