Social Media Success Stories: How Southwest Airlines Created Engagement and Generated Sales on Facebook

YOU MISSED IT!

If you love to fly or do it often, but didn’t catch the Southwest Airlines promotional deal on Facebook Friday August 3rd, then you seriously missed out on a great half-off deal with the airlines company. To celebrate reaching a very impressive 3 million Facebook fans, Southwest offered 50% off fall flights for fans that booked on Friday.

In this weeks episode of the Future of Engagement, Murray Newlands further discusses Southwest’s successful marketing campaign and what you can learn from its example for your brand.

SOUTHWEST PROMOTION:

Facebook fans of Southwest were given the promotional code “LUV2LIKE” to use on certain “Wanna Get Away” round-trip flights for the dates September 5th, 11th, 18th, 25th, October 2nd, 31st, and November 6th. The deal only worked on those specific dates and only if fans booked their flights before midnight Friday August 3rd at southwest.com.

While you may not have been able to take advantage of this offer, there are still some important things to learn from Southwest’s story. This is a great way to promote your brand, create engagement, and generate sales from social media.

Not only did Southwest celebrate an important milestone
with their fans, they also made sure to thank and
reward them for their support.

TURN LEMONS INTO LEMONADE:

Something else to note is that with the incredible number of people trying to take advantage of this offer, Southwest suffered website performance issues and had some customers get charged multiple times.

Southwest was open about technical issues showing
they care, they listen, and they are super popular!

Rather than seeing this as a failure, Southwest held its composure and used it as a way to show their fans and customers they were a transparent company and were not afraid to be in constant conversation with their fans on Facebook about solving website problems and reimbursing customers.

Southwest acquired almost 150,000 more fans following the
promotion – certainly another great social media success.

SOCIAL MEDIA ENGAGEMENT TAKEAWAYS:

So what can you take away from Southwest Airlines to help your business?

• Do not forget to celebrate social media successes to keep your customers engaged.
• Create a promotion which drives sales as well as buzz to deliver ROI from your successes.

Highlights:

• Social Media Marketing
• Increasing Engagement
• Generating Sales

The social media monitoring tool Alerti was used to make the graph above that shows the peak in conversation about Southwest with their promotional code offer. Alerti is a great tool for bloggers since it lets them see what people are saying on certain topics through different social media platforms

If you are interested in doing social media monitoring for yourself,
click this link for a free Social Media Monitoring White Paper.

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Gail Gardner

Small Business Marketing Strategist at GrowMap

Gail Gardner is the founder of GrowMap.com. She is a Small Business Marketing Strategist she mentors small businesses, bloggers, and freelancers. After 23 years in the field with IBM and 5.5 years managing AdWords accounts, her focus shifted to small business marketing strategy. GrowMap.com is listed by Cision as a Top 100 Site for Marketers and has received three Small Business Influencer Awards from Small Business Trends. Named by D&B a Top 50 SMB Influencer on Twitter, you can follow Gail @GrowMap and on LinkedIn.

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