Airlines have in the main embraced social media although in some cases perhaps because they have been forced to respond to some vociferous consumer conversations.
Such is their presence on Twitter that SimpliFlying has got together with social media benchmarking company Unmetric to produce some nifty research on how quickly airlines respond to tweets.
The analysis is of airline activity in the past 30 days and reveals Delta Air Lines has the fastest average response time of 11 minutes via its @deltaassist handle.
US Airways came out with the worst average response time of more than seven hours with United Airlines some way ahead at almost two-and-a-half hours.
As per the second chart, Delta Assist also came first in the volume of tweets it sent in the 30 days, 4,235, more than double the number sent by JetBlue, which is often held up as the airline social media champion.
According to this behind the scenes look at Delta's social media operation the airline devotes 12 people to handling Delta Assist.
The full analysis, which also shows which airlines provide a 24-hour service and a breakdown of what the tweets are, can be found here.