Happy week 15, all!

For my individual project, I looked at the Facebook pages of Changi Airport, Heathrow Airport and Frankfurt Airport over a two-week period in March 2016. These three airports were chosen because they all rank in the top 15 of the Skytrax awards and are known to many to have utilized their Facebook pages sufficiently to engage their passengers.

Research Question

My research question for this paper seeks to look at Changi Airport, Heathrow Airport and Frankfurt Airport’s Facebook usage and based on the data, to also look at how Heathrow Airport can further engage in social media campaigns to increase passenger engagement, to give it the edge over other airports that have traffic volume as high as itself.

Data Collection and Analysis

Through this research, I analyzed the PTAT scores, check-ins, page likes and content and I realized these were some facts that were evident:

1. Changi Airport had the highest number of page likes with the lowest passenger traffic and were able to gain the most likes, shares and comments per post compared to the other two airports
2. Heathrow Airport had the most number of check-ins but the least number of page likes and celebratory posts were the most welcomed type of posts.
3. Frankfurt Airport had promotions but a lot of its content are information-distribution type posts.

Suggestions

Among the three airports, Heathrow Airport was the airport that had the most room for improvement and hence, these suggestions to build customer relations as well as to introduce the facilities of Heathrow Airport — something that successful airports often do.

#DiscoveringHeathrow Campaign

This campaign seeks to engage passengers who have already checked-in on their Facebook page to further participate in the #DiscoveringHeathrow Campaign. Passengers all be encouraged to participate in this campaign whereby they go to the different areas and take photos of what they think is unique to that of Heathrow Airport, add a caption and the hashtag. This month-long campaign will allow four individuals (one winner per week) to take home a collector’s item which will be mailed to them. Through this, passengers will be encouraged to roam around and see for themselves what facilities Heathrow Airport has to offer them. Furthermore, data from this campaign can be used to identify which facilities need to be improved on or further publicized.

A Child’s Tale

A Child’s Tale will focus on introducing the behind-the-scenes of Heathrow Airport by a parent-child team. The parent, a staff of Heathrow Airport, will be permitted to bring his child into the airport where he can explain to the child his job roles as well as facilities of the airport.  A video will be created based on this interaction and the child will be interviewed on what he thinks of the job his parents is undertaking. The idea of this campaign is to encourage the family-oriented theme Heathrow Airport has as well as ideally, to appeal to emotion with the use of a child in the video. As Heathrow Airport does not really post video content, this will add a fresh content type to the page.

Christmas at Heathrow

This event will be held over a ten-day period before, during and after Christmas and will have three separate surprises to it. Christmas at Heathrow will have three daily surprises, one being that of a unique collector’s item being placed in each of the five terminals at Heathrow Airport, another being that of introducing a free food item or beverage from partner restaurants within terminals and the last being that of a caroling session held at different times of the day around the airport. This event is targeted at being an annual event and the objective of it is to increase passenger engagement and stakeholder engagement — by telling store owners that the Heathrow Airport is a huge community. With Heathrow Airport’s celebratory posts being the most attractive to their current Facebook fans, this event will strengthen the relationship between current and potential fans of Heathrow Airport.

All three airports have very unique ways of engaging their passengers but I feel that with the scale of Heathrow Airport’s traffic volume, the more they engage their passengers, the higher the likelihood of them choosing to fly through Heathrow Airport and these strategies will hopefully give them an edge over similar high-volume traffic airports.

All the best to everyone! Have a great summer and graduation ahead!
Regards,

Inez