American Airlines has parlayed the news of its rebranding, website redesign, and planned merger with US Airways into big gains in followership across social media platforms.
AA has seen a jump in its YouTube subscribers, from 7,400 at the start of the year to 11,000 today—which is a 49% spike.
Peter Claridge of Unmetric, a social media benchmarking company, says the explanation is the quality of the company's videos on its rebranding and merger.
The most popular of these videos was Behind the Scenes - Creating American Airlines New Look, Logo and Livery, which attracted 194,727 views.
The video tells the backstory behind the rebranding, a category of content that other brands have also seen perform well.
American has seen growth for its Twitter account @AmericanAir, too. AA had 481,910 at the start of the year, which has since blossomed to today's 510,270, or about a 6% jump.
The growth has been driven by features such as a live tweet chat with its vice president of customer care, plus the use of custom URLs that reinforce the company's branding message when its links are shared, such as aa.com/arriving.
Meanwhile on Facebook, the brand's fan page has grown since January 1st, soaring from 538,000 to 577,500.
Major changes in a brand's look and level of service can frighten customers, but the balance of sentiment on the social platforms has been positive, thanks in part to the airline's deft handling of customer concerns.