Southwest Airlines’ vision to be the world’s most loved, most efficient, and most profitable airline extends throughout the Company in many ways, including our approach to social media strategy.
Facebook is Southwest’s leading social media channel and, in fact, one of the travel industry’s leading social media brand channels. This success is attributed to a winning strategy and clear objectives.
Our objectives include:
Maintain a leading presence in the platform algorithm by posting at least 5x per week
Lead Southwest’s competitors in total impressions and engagements for the year
Deliver at least 100M impressions and 10M engagements by the end of the year
Beat our 2022 average engagement rate of 6.8% by at least 1 point
We use our Facebook page as a platform to bring our brand to life through organic storytelling, entertainment, community engagement, education, inspiration, and lead generation. With over 6 million followers, we know our posts are seen by not only Customers, but also Employees, shareholders, Brand fans, and others on Facebook who may be unfamiliar with our brand. With this in mind, we keep our Heart at the forefront of our Facebook page while avoiding overproduced, corporate-leaning content.
Southwest’s Facebook strategy centers around authentic storytelling, relevant user-generated content (UGC) sourcing, and user engagement.
Authentic Storytelling: Using an organic, people-first approach to storytelling, Southwest tells stories that highlight how we have the best Employees and Customers. Some of these stories we find organically, but many of these stories are curated by our social media managers to create uplifting and inspiring moments for our Customers that they will never forget.
Relevant UGC Sourcing: Using a strong community of plane spotters, Customers who tag Southwest, Employee Facebook groups, and connections with Employees from across the Company, our social media managers source pictures, stories, and content from a variety of sources. This large community of brand fans helps us share a large volume of high-quality posts.
User Engagement: Using engagement prompts, we encourage our followers to engage with our posts in a fun and relatable way. This gets our followers excited about the idea of traveling and booking flights in an organic, social-forward way without making them feel pummeled with corporate advertising.
Our social media managers do not work with an agency and handle all creative development, content curation, and scheduling in-house. While there are larger Company announcements and goals to promote different initiatives, we take a People-first approach to create a more personal and human feel to our content. Here are some examples of the type of content we share:
Heartwarming Storytelling
Brand Partnerships
Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
Company News and Updates
Environmental Sustainability
Marketing Initiatives
Network Updates
Employer Brand Initiatives
2023 KPIs:
287 posts
8.4% engagement rate
6.2 million total followers
182 million impressions
471.3k average impressions per post
14.4 million total engagements
95.3% SCNS score (proprietary sentiment score, on a scale from -100% to 100%)
Top performing posts:
11.2 million impressions
9.57 million impressions
8.47 million impressions
8.08 million impressions
7.7 million impressions
In Comparison to Our Competitors
*Looking at 7 other major US-based airlines
Southwest is first in number of followers
Southwest is first in estimated impressions
Southwest is first in overall engagements
Southwest is first in engagements per post
