Airlines beware – the new standard for responding on Twitter is 10 minutes

Aug 31, 2011 by Dirk Singer

At Rabbit we do a lot of work in the aviation sector, so this chart from STELLAService (via TNW) interested me.   It concerns the Twitter response times of the major US airlines during the recent disruptions around Hurricane Irene.

A few things about this chart:

The response times were to say the least very patchy.   AirTran didn’t respond at all.   Others, which have in the past been lauded for their social media expertise also didn’t do so well.

For example, SouthWest appeared in Time Magazine’s top 140 Twitter accounts, yet took over six hours on average to get back to passengers. Perhaps the volume of tweets sent to the @southwestair account was just too much for the team to handle – at one point on Sunday night 2+% of all tweets (worldwide) were about Hurricane Irene.

However, SouthWest actually tweeted less in August than in June (source tweetstats), which implies that Twitter was not used as a ‘real time’ crisis comms plan – a number of brand tweets found their way into the account on Friday 26th (the day before the shutdown), including an invitation to hang out with the SouthWest DJ’s on Turntable FM.

At the same time two US airlines – Delta and JetBlue – notched up an impressive Twitter record.   Delta responded to every single Hurricane Irene tweet sent to them by STELLAService, with an average response time of 14 minutes.  JetBlue responded to most, but the ones that it did respond to, were answered in 11 minutes.

Delta and JetBlue have huge follower numbers – 232k and 1.6 million respectively.  As a result if you are an airline the chances are you will encounter someone who has flown with one of these two carriers, Delta obviously also having extensive international route map – and it raises the bar for what passenger expectations are when using social media.

Both Delta and JetBlue also responded 2-3x faster on Twitter than on the phone (for other airlines the reverse was true with US Airways answering the phone in two minutes – compared to American, which took an hour and a half).

Last year the American Red Cross published a study which said that an hour was an acceptable response time if people had an emergency and were asking for help on social media.   The new standard – ten minutes?

 

 

Related articles

• Bucks Blog: How Airlines Fared in the Hurricane Irene Test (bucks.blogs.nytimes.com)
• Airlines that garner the most complaints (msnbc.msn.com)
• Here come the Twitter ads…from accounts you don’t follow (thenextweb.com)
• Airlines on Twitter Monthly Report for July 2011 reveals that more airlines have Twitter accounts than loyalty programs (simpliflying.com)