United Launches @United Ditching 193k Twitter Followers
This morning as the sun rose over United Airlines’ headquarters in Chicago, the airline was embarking on the start of a new era dubbed Customer Day One. Along with new changes in logos and branding being unveiled at Chicago O’Hare International Airport, the airline made a change in its social media …
… on the afternoon of March 4th 2011, United Airlines began planning for its transition to merge its two Twitterstreams, @UnitedAirlines and @Continental, to a single Twitterstream for the new airline … @United. The unveiling of this new Twitterstream was scheduled to coincide with the airline’s Customer Day One campaign, and this morning, shortly after 6:00am in Chicago @United tweeted “Welcome to @united. Here you’ll find updates about the new United, so spread the news about our new location on Twitter.”
The introduction of a single Twitterstream for both airlines was not unexpected; the transition to @United was not unexpected … however in this transition the airline made a significant tactical error in leaving more than 193,000 @UnitedAirlines followers behind. When United Airlines launched the new Twitterstream they didn’t simply change the name of one of the Twitterstreams to preserve its followers, those it follows and its continuity, it started an entirely new Twitterstream, with zero followers, following zero people.
Changing a Twittername and preserving all your followers, so they automatically are following your new Twittername is easy. Twitter users simply need to click Settings, then scroll down the Username field, type in the new Twittername you’d like … and that’s it. You have a new Twittername and everyone you follow and who follows you is automatically transferred.
While it was not possible for United Airlines to retain both @UnitedAirlines’ 193,000+ followers and @Continental’s 143,000+ followers, I was puzzled by United Airlines’ choice in leaving all their followers behind and enquired as to the logic behind this decision. The following is the response I received from United Airlines, via Rahsaan Johnson in the airline’s public relations department:
“Twitter told us our option was to change either @continental or @unitedairlines to @united, or to start fresh. So we elected to start fresh. And with more than 5000 followers today alone, there’s no doubt people want to talk to us”
While the new @United Twitterstream may already have more than 5,000 followers after less than a day, the airline has still left a massive number of followers behind. The logic behind the decision to start fresh with @United can be equated like this.
“We had two bank accounts. We were told we could take $193,000 and convert it to a new account, or we could throw that $193,000 away and hope some of the money floats back to us while starting to earn new money, from zero. We chose to throw that $193,000 away and start from scratch.”
In social media airlines, and all companies, need to be proactive and maintain their relationship with their customers. Companies engaging in social media must protect their followers, and leverage their skills to attract new followers and build loyalty. United Airlines faced a difficult challenge in having to coax their 143,000+ @Continental followers to migrate to the new @United Twitterstream … but now the airline is faced with the challenge of transferring 336,000+ followers to the new account. Yes, some people followed both accounts, but likely the major of followers did not follow both Twitterstreams.
United Airlines could have done this transition more effectively. The airline had @United in their possession for 75 days prior to today and has known about Customer Day One for far longer than that. The efforts United Airlines must put forth to rebuild their Twitter follower base could have been used in a more effective manner, because throwing away something you already have, that you know you need to retain, is never a good decision.
On a side note … the second Twitterstream @United followed after it began Tweeting this morning was @FlyingWithFish
Happy Flying!
With all the other crap United has done did you really expect them to do the smart, logical, simple, cheap, and easy thing? Me neither.
This decision is really rather incomprehensible. It’s almost some CO person’s ego couldn’t stomache migrating the UnitedAirlines folks to United, so (s)he dumped them
Perhaps they’ll give away 1500 miles again to follow them!
This hasn’t been a merger of equals, it has been the Jeff Smisek Show. Smisek’s ego & co. have gotten rid of so much stuff where United had the superior name/product (Red Carpet Club, Red Carpet, tiered elite checkin/boarding, logo, boarding areas). Every day I think they can’t do something stupider, and most of the time they prove me wrong. As a shareholder and flier I don’t like what I see and unfortunately I may end up jumping ship and going to Delta.
Haha wow, I can’t believe they did this. Best part is that I bet they paid some new age marketing company a ton of money to set this new account up for them.
Meh, in a week no one will care.
colpuck +1 can’t believe anyone actually cares about this
Your objection to branding decisions will make you choose another carrier? Or maybe it is the effort of having to follow a new twitter feed? Ok, bye bye. In 4 years Delta will have E+. Of course, you won’t be able to find a FF ticket, but at least you’ll like the color scheme on the plane better…
This is a big mistake on United’s part.
In addition to losing its existing @UnitedAirlines followers, “united” is a somewhat generic word. As a result, @United subscribers will likely have to sort through all the Tweets that have no relation to the airline, but simply contain the word “united.”
Let’s hope that the airline improves its social media act going forward. Thus far, neither UA nor CO have favorably distinguished themselves in this channel.
I doubt many serious road warriors follow Twitter anyway.
I have to think that there is more to this than meets the eye. Is it not possible that internally a decision was made to avoid using either of the old accounts in a way that would project which one was “really” the new United? On the surface, I think the # of followers would be compelling enough reason to get over any internal sensitivity over such a decision, but it’s possible that they judged that sensitivity to be important enough to go ahead and avoid it entirely.
Additionally, one could look at this as an opportunity of sorts to shed all of the previous followers and introduce people to the new brand (e.g. the baggage of thousands of folks who only started following because they wanted to complain about one or the other of the ‘old’ airlines). Again, the relative value of this option vs. taking nearly 200k followers with you for the ride would still be in question.
But these are just two plausible reasons for making this choice. I have to think that they were not simply ignorant that they had the option (and that’s what they’ve told you – they knew they could change one of the names, and they chose not to do that).
Great news guys:
@United is almost to 12k followers almost three weeks after it’s launch. Since @United was launched @UnitedAirlines has gained almost 7k followers. Sometimes (and by that I mean just about every time they announce something) I really wonder what the hell they are doing. At this rate, within a few years United will be an airline in steady decline and Delta will be back to number one.