Abstract

The airline industry is known as one of the most active industries on Twitter. Twitter fan pages are used by airlines for different purposes, e.g., customer service, complaint management, branding, and promotions. Firms try to motivate users to enhance fan page engagement. Thus, social computing techniques have become more important in recent years as these enable firms to improve their impact on fan page activities and to analyze user behavior. Apart from operational factors and reputation concerns, different fan page management strategies adopted by the airlines lead to different numbers of followers and followings, and, consequently, different rates of user engagement. This research explores how airlines develop their fan page strategies on Twitter, and how the similarity of generated content leads to higher engagement rates. We examine different aspects of firms’ tactics in reaction to users’ activities on fan pages, and common methods in managing content of fan pages. Our empirical study consists of a sample of 36 prominent airlines all around the world. We analyze the data obtained from a set of almost 153,992 postings (including tweets, retweets, and replies) that are published on the companies’ fan pages. Our results show that the topics of the company tweets can be categorized based on some characteristics of the fan page. Moreover, there is a relationship between a company’s activities on fan pages and number of followers.

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