Social Media and Primary Commercial Service Airports

Abstract

Throughout the past decade, the aviation industry in the United States has continually encountered significant socioeconomic burdens. Most notably, the tragic events of September 11, 2001, left the industry highly susceptible to economic turmoil, such as the global recession accentuated by record-high fuel prices, as well as sociological events like the world pandemic in the form of severe acute respiratory syndrome. The nation's airports, the infrastructure supporting this industry, are no exception. In conjunction with these onerous events, continuing cuts in intergovernmental funding sources, as well as weakened revenue streams, have forced airports to use contemporary tools, strategies, and techniques to reinforce traditional management functions. The use of social media platforms, such as blogs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Foursquare, is a growing trend throughout various public and private industries to increase effectiveness, efficiency, and overall yield in relation to marketing and communication strategies. Consistent with new public management techniques and the reinvention of government in the 1980s, conducive to cost-efficiency and customer-centric approaches, airports use social media to increase self-sufficiency by reducing expenditures associated with traditional marketing and communication modes. In addition, social media technologies enable airports to target, engage, and foster two-way communication more effectively with a multitude of audiences. This study provides an overview of these popular social media services and empirically examines, both quantitatively and qualitatively, the current usage of social media throughout primary commercial service airports. Statistics on airport usage and best practices are provided to support preliminary guidance on the use of social media at airports.

Understanding the Role of Online Media Platforms in Airport Capital Projects and Community Outreach

“…Although the list of airports examined by Halpern does not match the list of airports considered for our study, it shows an upward trend in online media presence (11). This growing trend is highlighted by Stambaugh, which also provides an excellent overview of Facebook and Twitter use by airports, along with examples of best practice and recommendations with regards to those two platforms (12). We align our work particularly strongly with Stambaugh, albeit with a focus on audio-video content (12).…”

“…This growing trend is highlighted by Stambaugh, which also provides an excellent overview of Facebook and Twitter use by airports, along with examples of best practice and recommendations with regards to those two platforms (12). We align our work particularly strongly with Stambaugh, albeit with a focus on audio-video content (12). Stambaugh also notes that an important future work relevant to airport social media use will be the examination of their use within the airport master planning process (12).…”

Natural language processing approach for appraisal of passenger satisfaction and service quality of public transportation

“…NLP is an important aspect of artificial intelligence that can increase efficiency in transportation research [14]. The transport sector can use NLP to achieve various objectives, including traffic safety, traffic investigation, and traffic management [15]. Fifty percent of the local government agencies in Texas use social media for public involvement in transportation planning [16].…”

“…Natural language processing (NLP) techniques present an opportunity to understand people's opinions regarding public transportation. Most studies on transportation using NLP techniques are based on social media [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17], in which hashtags are used to collect the relevant tweets. The tweets associated with these hashtags are less relevant in transportation than comments posted under the specific transit facilities on comment websites.…”

Analysing the Social Media Marketing Content of Leading Arab Airports

“…Social media platforms can be categorized into: -blogs, microblogs, media and documents sharing sites, syndication applications, location-based applications and social media management tools. ) Stambaugh, 2012). The social media concept can be summarized in the following definition: "the group of Internet based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content (Halpern, 2014).…”