Engagement Measures: Southwest versus JetBlue
I’ve been travelling by plane this summer both with my family and as a lone business traveller. My experiences were different but uneventful both trips. And I mean uneventful in a good way. I’ve had to use the slide to exit a plane onto a tarmac in Dallas and let me tell you, you pick up some speed and that concrete landing comes fast. Uneventful is a good user experience for me.
Year round, airlines are in a good position to provide a user experience unlike other services. Some also provide great online user experiences through Twitter, blogging, and Facebook interactions.
Southwest Airlines has been blogging at Nuts About Southwest since April of 2006, and you can read Radian6 case studies about their social media monitoring and also about their coordinated response to FAA inquiries into their safety practices. Their crisis communication team also recently dealt with an angry Kevin Smith blasting his seat policy enforcement situation to 1 million Twitter followers.
Southwest Airlines gets work done in the social media world, no doubt. They’ve risen to multiple challenges. So how do they measure up to another airline on their social media engagement? I compared two Facebook pages of airlines – Southwest on one side, and JetBlue on the other site. JetBlue strikes me as another airline who wants to create a user experience around air travel. Their tagline is Happy Jetting, and they have a blog as well called BlueTales. I let the data collector gather information for about a month, observing interactions on facebook.com/JetBlue and facebook.com/Southwest.
Unlike the last post studying two camera brands, in the case of airline brands, the one who has the most followers also appears to have the most active engagement. Check out these side-by-side comparisons.
There seemed to be a spike in engagement on June 22nd. There were so many posts in the last month on the Southwest Facebook Wall that I couldn’t see what was posted that day in particular. On JetBlue’s Wall they had three posts that day, had quite a few comments (nearly 400) when they asked for feedback on their Cheeps program that offers travel deals to Twitter followers. I believe that a single day of engagement spike is what causes the pie chart to show a higher engagement rate per day for JetBlue.
The Engagement Rate represents the amount of engagements as a function of the total membership base in this community for the chosen time period. This is engagement over a million users in total. Engagement Rate is calculated as the number of daily engagements / number daily members. For Engagement Rate Ratio, we compare the average engagement rates over time, in this case a month’s time.
What do you think? Would you find this useful for comparing your brand against another? Feel free to sign up for our private beta at lugiron.com if you want to find out more and start using our social media metrics and community analytics tool.