Which European airlines reacted well to ash on Facebook?

Which European airlines reacted well to ash on Facebook? - article content

Social media is said to be a good customer care channel, and when none of the other care channels work fast enough and you are waiting on a call for hours, you should try asking a company on their Facebook page wall.

Europe had and still to date (May 25, 2011) has an airline crisis with a new ash cloud – so how did airlines in Europe deal with it?

We analyzed couple key airlines hit by the ash right now with bigger Facebook pages, where we took into account their ability to answer questions from their fans. So how did they do? Check them out below!

Time range of analysis: May 21–25, 2011 T00:00

The best airline in response rates in this case was KLM, which we would like to congratulate to. Many other airlines also did well though, like Alitalia, Air France, EasyJet and Lufthansa – all had a response rate of over 60%, which is really far above the market average response rate (5 – 10%). So the companies did focus well on it, and hopefully all can get better with time.

The worst airline in dealing with their Facebook page was British Airways, who have closed their Facebook profile for user questions. BIG thumbs down. When you want to make social media a monologue, don't enter social media. We could also calculate Ryanair as a big loser on social media, as it looks as they don't even run their own Facebook pages (they can claim quite easily).

To sum up, hopefully this will be a great learning for companies that provide services like airlines, who should be responding every post on social media. The best teacher for them could be the Twitter account of Eurocontrol, who gives very quick and relevant responses on airline and travel information, and also they update the most recent ash cloud news.

Research has been done thanks to Socialbakers Page Analytics. Monitor also your market at http://analytics.socialbakers.com.