Since we published numerous posts about the ranking of Airlines on Twitter in terms of followers, we recently started to analyze why there are some airlines much more successful on Twitter than others. When taking a look at our latest ranking it is obvious that the success of airlines is highly influenced by the region/continent of the airline. Airlines from North America are by far the most successful – Asia, South America & Europe are more or less equal and Africa is far behind.
Certainly, one main reason is the general usage of Twitter in different countries or world regions. Just taking into account that around 50% of all Twitter users are located in North America it makes it much easier for North American airlines to get new/more followers.
Nevertheless when analyzing how airlines use Twitter we found another very interesting fact which explains the difference between the world regions.
As shown in the illustration below airlines from North America mainly use Twitter to get in contact with their customers or reply to their inquiries. More than 86% of all tweets are customer-related. In Europe, Asia and South America it looks quite different – here, Twitter is used as an information and marketing tool to a much greater extend than as an customer relationship tool. However it’s worth to mention that there are airlines in Europe (e.g. KLM, Air France), in Asia (e.g. Air Asia, Malaysian Airlines) and South America (e.g. TAM, AeroMexico) which are already using Twitter as a customer relationship tool. But there are even a some major European & Asian airlines which are not taking advantage of this potential at all. Africa as already mentioned is far behind the other regions – main purpose of Twitter here is to provide general information, only ~25% of all Tweets are customer-related.
In the future we believe that first and foremost European and Asian airlines will increase their customer relationship on Twitter significantly as the usage of Twitter is increasing and still has a lot of potential. We will definitely update this chart during the next month and keep you posted….
- The above illustration shows our analysis of 10 major airlines of each region
- The analysis includes the 100 tweets of each airline
As always we do not take any responsibility of the correctness of the data.
