Infographic: Airlines Make the Case for Integrated Social Media

Today's infographic is pretty specific in that it only looks at how various airlines are allocating sometimes-limited resources to social media. But there are a few key takeaways for anybody looking to play a bigger role in this space, a larger lesson to be learned.

Created by SimpliFlying, the infographic shows, quite clearly, that the airline industry has found integrated social media to be better than dedicated social media. That is, having multiple people across the company working together is a smarter use of resources than building a social media department or team that works exclusively on promoting the brand through Twitter, Facebook and other venues.

Infographics are always a bit of a hodgepodge of statistics culled from a variety of sources. Here, we sort through the clutter and pull out some of our favorite facts and figures:

• The number of tweets received by airlines increased by about 60 percent between February 2011 and March 2011.
• In March 2011, airlines received 101,400 tweets and sent out more than 24,000 replies. They're able to do this by dedicating more resources to social media. Forty percent of airlines, according to SimpliFlying's statistics, are expanding their social media team, drawing in members from marketing, customer service, e-commerse, corporate communications and other departments.
• KLM, which has 23 staff focusing on social media as part of a dedicated staff, has 125,000 Twitter followers and 200,000 Facebook fans. Southwest Airlines, which has only four employees trained in social media in an integrated model, has 1,100,000 Twitter followers and even more Facebook fans.

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