Q&A: Icelandair on Twitter and the volcanic ash crisis

How did you use Twitter to communicate with customers during the volcano ash crisis?

At first it started out as a bulletin board where we posted notices that our website had been updated with the latest information on flight numbers and departure times. We turned our route-network inside out and moved our main hub to Glasgow in order to keep the network running, so using all means available to us to get information out there was essential.

This however changed as time went by and we saw that we needed to get information on individual flights to people and our passengers started to notice we were on-line and answering questions.

In response to this customer demand, we then started to break our web updates down to many short tweets which all contained a short message, a bit.ly link and the #ashtag.

Why do you think Twitter is more effective than Facebook for this kind of situation?

Twitter is more dynamic and forgiving when it comes to frequent updates. When flooding Facebook users with too many updates they are likely to hide your feed, while Twitter users are used to frequent updates, and in fact rely on getting frequent updates from the people they follow.