Air France: How many Facebook likes is enough?

By Mark Frary

Air France has this week announced that it has achieved more than one million Likes for its Facebook page . It has achieved this number in a shade over two years, having started on the network in July 2010. The main source countries for these likes are France (20%), Brazil (9%), Italy (8%), India (6%), Tunisia (6%) and Japan (5%).

Much of the recent growth in Likes has come from a campaign the airline organised which involved a vote between 5,000 fans who could use the network to choose which destination on the airline’s network would benefit from a two-day 30% discount.

Another recent popular campaign on Facebook and Twitter was a competition to see which of the carrier’s social media fans could make the best paper plane. (As an aside, the airline has 250,000 followers for its 23 international Twitter accounts and 4,600 followers on Instagram, where it has shared 10,000 photos in the course of six months.)

The airline uses Facebook to good effect – asking fans for guidance on which advertising campaign to use, sharing photos of gorgeous French food, in fact anything that can create an interaction between Air France and its existing and potential passengers.

The milestone comes just shortly after Facebook announced the launch of Global Pages for brands that work globally, like Air France. What this means is that companies working in lots of different markets can work with Facebook to establish separate pages for each of these markets.

Crucially, the brand can just have a single Facebook URL and Facebook does the work behind the scenes to direct users of the social network to the appropriate page for the market. Statistics, such as Likes and Talking About, will reflect the overall global figure rather than the figure for the individual market.

One travel brand that has already worked with Facebook and global Pages is the hotel chain Holiday Inn. See where it takes you - for me in the UK, it redirects to Holiday Inn’s UK Facebook presence. For others that will be different. It is a great step for brands that want to offer localised content that is relevant to their important overseas markets.

Anyway, back to those million Facebook Likes. Just how relevant is a number like that? I was at a conference recently where the head of a major travel industry association bemoaned the fact that his country did not have as many Likes as Dubai, despite being much larger and with a bigger tourism industry. I pointed out it is all about quality not quantity.

A million Likes means nothing if they are not engaged with your brand and have only gone there because they have been “bought”. Luckily, Air France seems to have understood this.