United Airline's struggle to understand how social media works
Skift Take
United needs to stop making excuses and face that it's been absolutely lousy with social media. When you're being dominated by regional players like AeroMexico and Viva Aerobus, you're losing.
Above downtown Chicago, on the 28th floor of Willis Tower, United Airlines employees stare at double-paneled computer monitors and communicate with the world without speaking.
Members of the social media team at United are sometimes dealing one-on-one with a customer on Facebook or Twitter about a missed flight connection, or blasting out messages to hundreds of thousands about the airline's newest airfare promotion.
On a recent day, they answered questions from a young woman in New York who describes herself on Twitter as a "gold medalist in sarcasm." She was worried her flight would be delayed because of weather. They also helped a mother wanting to know if her toddler needed a separate plane ticket.
On Facebook, they answered a question about the rules for flying with pets. On Twitter, they posted a snapshot of an aircraft engine to intrigue aviation geeks.
Chicago-based United Airlines, the world's largest carrier, is not a leader in using social media, at least yet. It ranks below industry average on many of the newfangled social media metrics, such as interactions, response time and Twitter followers.
Even after several years of prominence for social media, United and companies in many industries are still trying to figure it out -- trying to decide just how seriously to take it and what to use it for; fruitlessly trying to calculate a return on investment.
See how United and other airlines use social media on SkiftSocial.
One thing is certain: Corporate America, until recently, could mostly ignore Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn.
Now it does so at its peril.
United, like others, is winging it and learning on the fly.
Experts are starting to link companies' social media activities with their bottom lines. One report by J.D. Power & Associates found a correlation between overall satisfaction with a company's social marketing efforts and consumer likelihood to buy something from that company. It also affected the overall perception of the company.
"There are so many companies that are dabbling or leaving it all in the hands of the marketing team and not really paying attention," said Jacqueline Anderson, director of social media and text analytics at J.D. Power.
That's a problem when consumers, especially young people, are turning to social media for substantive interaction, such as customer service.
"Companies that aren't thinking about social media in that way
