SOARING HIGH WITH SOCIAL MEDIA

5 STEPS TO CREATING A SOCIAL LISTENINGSTRATEGY FOR THE AIRLINE INDUSTRY

INTRODUCTIONAre you ready to take off with social media? The airline industry, like many others, has been dramatically affected by the influence of social media. Your passengers and prospective passengers are already on social media discussing you, your competitors and the overall airline industry. Social media has pro-vided consumers with a platform to share their voice on mass, handing the customer the power to have a huge impact on an airline’s reputation.

Don’t miss out on the opportunity to integrate social into customer service, marketing, crisis and reputation management, sales and HR initiatives. With the right education and technology, you can put a social listening and engagement strategy in place, start interacting more effectively with your passengers and use social intelligence to achieve business results.

With effective social strategies you can respond to passenger’s negative experiences quickly and efficiently and turn a bad situation into a positive customer experience. While social media has become a more efficient way to deliver information, and deal with crises, airlines can now go a step further and use social media to actually solve customer problems, not just offer up apologies.

According to a recent study by TripAdvisor, travel planning is more and more dominated by online resources - including social media. Travel review websites have most influence (69%), followed by online travel agencies (57%), travel provider sites (56%) and friends & relatives (43%). And according to the Daily Mail, 70% of travelers update their Facebook page while on vacation.

In this ebook we will help you develop an effective social listening strategy, from takeoff to landing. Learn how to:

Align Social Media Monitoring with your Business Objectives

Become your Community’s Concierge

Provide First-Class Customer Service

Be Prepared for Escalating Crises

Measure your Success

SOARING HIGH WITH SOCIAL MEDIA5 STEPS TO CREATING A SOCIAL LISTENING STRATEGY FOR THE AIRLINE INDUSTRY

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69%TRAVEL REVIEW WEBSITES

57%ONLINE TRAVEL AGENCIES

56%TRAVEL PROVIDER SITES

43%FRIENDS & RELATIVES

What influences travel planning?

ALIGN SOCIAL MONITORING WITH BUSINESS OBJECTIVES

To maximize insight into social media conversations be sure to define the right parameters, the most important of which is aligning your social monitoring strategy with your company’s business objectives.

To do this you must first identify your business objectives and evaluate how social media can help achieve your goals. A business-aligned social media strategy justifies the business case for investing in the right social media monitoring and engagement tool that is critical to its success.

BECOME YOUR COMMUNITY’S CONCIERGE

Social media monitoring will provide you with the opportunity to truly connect with your customers and fans. First - find out where your community “lives”. Do your customers and prospective passengers engage on twitter, blogs, forums or mainstream news? What keywords do they use the most? Maybe they’re discussing “travel”, “flying”, “airlines”, “flights” or “travel deals”. Maybe they’re using slightly less obvious words - like “points”, “meals”, or “wifi”.

A listening platform will help you seek out these conversations to give you a firm understanding of who your community is, where they are, what they are saying, and how you can offer a positive customer experience.

Planning for a vacation can be very difficult. There’s so much to plan – where to go, where to eat, where to stay, how to get there – social media gives airlines the tools to develop creative ways to help tourists plan their vacation. Inspire, engage and add value for your customers and community by providing them with useful insider travel information and a holistic overview of the destination – this will put your brand front of mind, position you as a thought leader in the industry, and give you an edge on the competition. Use social listening to gain valuable insights around your passengers and their questions about travelling - to provide them the most helpful, relevant information possible.

Virgin Atlantic’s award-winning travel website vtravelled.com links travellers around the world through an online community. It uses a special recommendations service to suggest site content from similar users, to provide helpful and relevant travel information tailored to each community member. The site includes real-time updates on the top 50 events happening in the destination a traveller is visiting.

SOARING HIGH WITH SOCIAL MEDIA5 STEPS TO CREATING A SOCIAL LISTENING STRATEGY FOR THE AIRLINE INDUSTRY

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PROVIDE FIRST-CLASS CUSTOMER SERVICE

With social listening, your customer service team can proactively seek out customer issues and collect insights to establish real-time communication between your brand and your consumers. People are constantly sharing their experiences from your airline – so you need to be listening in order to be aware and ready to chime in with help.

Airlines need to use social media to do more than offer up apologies and promote content - they need to solve problems. An effective engagement routing strategy, will empower community managers to route customer issues to the right places to actually deal with and correct the problems at hand. Enable your social team to take the information they learn through listening and engaging, to actually resolve customer issues.

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$&#@!Chances are you’ve seen frustrated tweets or facebook updates in your network, complaining about the delay of a flight – the airlines that respond to these complaints with helpful information are regarded highly throughout social media. By listening for these conversations and helping in real-time – you will turn a negative situation into a winning customer experience, and develop strong, lifelong relationships with your passengers – some will even become active advocates for your organization throughout the social space and beyond.

American Airlines not only informs and responds to customer questions on Twitter, but does so in a sincere and human approach.

Consumer insights from social listening will also provide the intelligence your airline needs to improve service, customer satisfaction, and sales.

BE PREPARED FOR ESCALATING CRISES

Define what a crisis is for your company, and build a crisis response chart with several levels of severity – this chart should outline who will be tasked with what in each situation. For example, if your company Twitter account gets hacked or an employee sends a mistweet from a corporate handle – you need to know who will be in charge, how they will be contacted, and how they will deal with the situation at hand.

There is nothing worse than learning of a crisis from internal company sources when you have a full-capacity social listening system in place, so it’s important to make sure you have the right alerts set up. Simple KPIs will alert you at the right time so you can avoid being overwhelmed with data at crucial times.

Give global reach to your company and invest in a tool that provides global coverage and language capabilities. For example, if you have passengers in China, you could be missing a wide range of potential crises if you’re not paying attention to the Chinese sites, like Renren, Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo.

Through social listening tools, it’s possible to pre-empt crises before customers take to social media. For example, if there is a consistent spike in negative commentary on Friday evenings, an airline can engage with customers, create offers and deals, or find other ways to make Friday evening travelers feel more satisfied, thus increasing loyalty.

Real-time alerts on your most sensitive topics

Data spikes to watch for an unusual influx in negative online conversations pertaining to your brand

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An easy way to do this is to base your alerting on:

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MEASURE YOUR SUCCESSCreate metrics and key performance indicators to track your social media success against business objectives and avoid wasting time pursuing information that doesn't matter to your brand.

Following the Parkinson’s law, leaders know that clear goals and short deadlines are a key variable to success. This rule applies to social media as well. One short-term goal at a time associated with one KPI is an effective way to keep control of your activities and teams while following a clear roadmap to achieve your long term mission.

CONCLUSIONThe social web has given customers a voice and a platform for feedback, opinion, discussion, andcollaboration. Your passengers and prospective passengers are already on social media discussing you, your competitors and your the overall airline industry.

At this point, airlines need to ask themselves, can you afford to not be listening to social media?

ABOUT SYNTHESIOSynthesio is a global social media monitoring company helping brands and agencies listen to, understand and engage with consumers worldwide. Synthesio helps clients cut through the social noise, focus on the conversations that matter most to the business, track and measure online reputation, collaborate and engage in real time, and manage consumer relationships in one single, easy to use platform. By delivering social media data of the highest quality within 190+ countries & 50 languages, clients receive crucial insights into their market’s opinions, wants and needs, to drive real business value.

Driving positive business change, and building stronger relationships with consumers since 2006.