Fastjet Facebook community larger than any other airline brand in Africa

24 Aug 2017

Fastjet has become the airline with the largest Facebook community in Africa due to its reimagined content strategy on the platform. The airline's Facebook pages for Tanzania, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Zambia collectively passed the 1.1 million mark in the number of followers.

A recent customer survey by Fastjet indicated that Facebook remains the most popular method of engagement for its customers at a preferred rate of 80% compared to Twitter and Instagram. Evident in its organic growth rate, Instagram is fast becoming more popular as an engagement platform, while Twitter’s newsfeed-style remains a platform where price and special-offers are digested quickly and responded to fast.

“Over the past few years different social media platforms have become quite defined in shape and purpose and according to our customers, Facebook remains the most popular channel to engage on all levels,” says Hein Kaiser, Fastjet spokesperson.

Redefining channel specifics

Beyond customer service, the carrier leverages its social media channels to drive network and destination awareness as well as communicating commercially. To this end, Fastjet has redefined the common and channel specific purpose of its social media presence.

“Customer service is an absolute priority with our response rate shortened from 55% over 2 days to 96% within an hour. In addition, we have repurposed our content strategy to balance hard sales with engaging, more visual content and increased our posting frequency to match feedback,” says Kaiser.

Twitter feeds have become a higher volume platform while Instagram and Facebook have a strong lifestyle element to content.

“Thus far the strategy seems to be effective with Fastjet’s social reputation improving vastly,” continues Kaiser.

Management of social communities

“Our objective is to effectively manage social communities across all aspects of engagement; from consumer-relevant content through to sales and special offers as well as customer service.”

As the airline grows, so it plans to develop its community to reflect the airline’s growing pan-African footprint. “Fastjet plans to touch the lives of everyone on the continent as we grow our brand into its ambition of being Africa’s pan-continental low-cost airline.”

“Social media is an animal of its own and the key lies in simplicity. Successful commercial campaigns have shown that the hard-sell is okay, but must be tempered with engaging content and reliable information. Brands need to be authentic and consumers will accept and engage on these mutually agreed, tacit terms. Fastjet has been experimenting with pure organic growth and measuring its rate of attrition against its redefined community and content strategy. Our rate of attrition has reduced significantly while organic growth has enabled Fastjet’s Facebook community to grow into pole position amongst its peers,” concludes Kaiser.