SkiftIQ: The Twitter Clients Behind Travel Brands' Social Media Success

Reaching current and future customers on Twitter is of primary concern to most travel brands, but there's no one set formula for success.

Yesterday we rolled out an update to SkiftIQ that added a number of new features. We also gave it a bit of facelift to bring it in line with our redesign we began rolling out in mid-January.

One of the features we added is the ability to see what tools travel brands are using when they post content to Twitter. Twitter clients, like Hootsuite or TweetDeck, allow brands to schedule tweets in advance, set up rules that allow for sharing information across groups, and monitor trending topics.

In addition to these more advanced tools, brands also post to Twitter though updates from other social sites like Pinterest or Facebook, apps on iPhones and Android devices, and Twitter.com, too.

We thought it would be interesting to see who's using what clients, so we did a dive into SkiftIQ to sort through the last 1,000 tweets of every travel brand.

Some highlights:

• When you add up all the activity in each of our eleven sectors, Hootsuite is the most-used client by volume in nine of those.
• Only in Airlines and Influencers is Hootsuite relegated to second place, behind the Twitter website and TweetDeck, respectively.

Twitter for iPhone shows up in the top five in eight out of the eleven sectors. This speaks more to the ubiquity of the iPhone than well-thought out strategy, as it offers no means to manage activity within an group. In most cases, brands are using it to respond to an issue on-the-fly within a smaller or even one-person social media team.

Interestingly, when you look at the best performing travel brands on social media as measured by Skift Score, none of the top 20 use Hootsuite for the majority of their activity. Rather, each brand (with the exception of AirAsia and Four Seasons Hotels), uses a proprietary or enterprise-level paid client.

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Twitter Clients of Top 20 Travel Brands on Social Media

Source: SkiftIQ

SNAP is American Airlines' proprietary social media tool, and AA's team uses it for 100% of its Twitter activity. In an effort to up its weak social game, post-merger US Airways recently began tweeting with it too, and it now represents 99.7% of the sister airline's activity.

American Air's social media team declined to answer questions about SNAP, but we know a few things about it from looking at other activity on SkiftIQ. American's response rate to customer issues is faster than any other airline -- 12 minutes. The Airline's activity is also 100% devoted to replying to customers. Whatever SNAP specs are, it's focus is on conversation and customer support.

Below we look at each of our eleven sectors and which clients are most used in each one. The Tweet Count is measured by adding up the last 1,000 tweets of each brand in that sector, and then counting up how many tweets were sent by each client.

Top Twitter Clients by Sector

Airlines

» See detailed Airlines data

Tunisair tweets exclusively via Facebook, while Go! Airlines (87%) and RAK Airways (66%) use it for the majority of their activity on Twitter. Many of the other brands that use Facebook to tweet only do so about 10% of the time, typically when they've shared something to their wall.

Airports

» See detailed Airports data

Cruise Lines

» See detailed Cruise Lines data

Destinations

» See detailed Destinations data

Hotel Brands

» See detailed Hotel Brands data

Booking Sites and Tools

» See detailed Bookings & Tools data

Media

» See detailed Media data

Travel and Tour Providers

» See detailed Travel and Tour Providers data

Ground Transportation

» See detailed Ground Transportation data

Hotel Properties

» See detailed Hotel Properties data

Influencers

» See detailed Influencers data

Learn More About SkiftIQ