How Southwest Connects With Passengers

Should your business be using Instagram as a brand? Southwest Airlines thinks so.

The popular airline has done their homework. Travelers are using smartphone apps like instagram more than ever. In order to align marketing efforts, Southwest went where people already were comfortable sharing – to the shareable world of smartphone photography, and to the largest and most-popular smartphone photo app in the world (Instagram).

This reminds us of a key social media marketing principle: alignment.

One of the most important things you can do as a brand is to align your company with social media. Your Facebook page should be a relevant source for what your brand offers as a product or service. Contrary to this, there are many companies who instead use their social sites as an independent island of non-relevant updates. They post, sure. But their social content mainly consists of election results, a few “happy holiday” photos and a meme of a cute baby.

If you’re smart like Southwest Airlines, you want to cater to what your customers can do and already do, socially speaking, during flight, i.e. use Instagram to share photos of their flight.

The same rule applies to a pizza shop. The owner of the pizza shop can incentive “Check Ins” on either Foursquare or Facebook Places because people already do it at their pizza shop. This gives the owner a relevant avenue to apply his/her brand to a social context. Therefore, becoming relevant in a social context gives the shop owner the ability reach millions of people with shareable content.

What avenues are available for your brand? Find out. We can help. Get started with Expio Consulting.