Why Twitter is not an effective sales channel for airlines?

1. Airline market penetration rates on Twitter are too low, the majority of airline customer base are not on Twitter.

I compared the follower numbers (as of 30 July, 2009) of top ten airlines in the Twitter universe against the number of passengers they carried in Year 2008.

Most airlines are not reaching even 1% of their customer base. Most airlines have far more names and other information in their email database than their Twitter accounts.

2. As small as airline’s Twitter audience is, it is in fact even smaller than it looks.

At any given moment, there is only a fraction of an airline’s followers are actually online and receiving tweets.

3. There is a mismatch of supply and demand.

Twitter population is skewered towards well-educated, prius driving, iPhone toting high income young professionals, hardly the target market segment for all the deep discounted air fares with lots of restrictions airlines have been pushing through Twitter.

4. Tweets are not targeted.

Unlike email promotion campaigns which can be targeted, tweets are one size for all.

5. Tweets have a extremely short shelf-life, and the Twitterverse is very noisy.

Unlike emails which can be opened any time that is convenient to the consumer, airline’s sales tweets are usually flushed out of view quickly by newer tweets from other parties before the audience even have the chance to read it.

6. Twitter users are not always in a position to buy.

A lot of people access Twitter on their mobile phone, but few airline’s website can handle ticket transactions on a mobile phone, so even if they want to buy, they can’t.

7. An A/B testing can easily prove Email is far more effective in selling airline discount tickets than Twitter.

Send out the same promotion through email campaigns and tweets, but with different channel codes, it will give airlines some much needed insights.