Still in its relative infancy, but travel companies are certainly starting to take Google Plus seriously, with airlines testing the water perhaps more than other sectors in the industry.
Simpliflying has taken a look at what airlines are doing with Google Plus and came up with the following findings:
- There are now 70 airlines with brand pages on Google Plus.
- The vast majority of the pages are in English – about 78.5%. But on average, pages in Spanish are "liked" more often.
- The airline with the highest number of "likes" (known as "+1"s) was Mexican low cost carrier Volaris with almost 3000, double that of the second most popular page.
- The most common type of content on Google Plus pages is brand-related (as opposed to sales related on Facebook or customer service related on Twitter).
Opinion is still pretty divided as to the overall value of Google Plus, compared to rival platform
Facebook, but certainly those that have managed to harness some kind of value from it are seeing some results.
Matt Rhodes, strategy director at UK-based agency Fresh Networks, for example, believes Google Plus has the ability to change search in fundamental ways over time and the data which Google is capturing and re-serving through its other, connected platforms is becoming a critical element of the social graph which, inevitably, brands will need to understand and utilise better.
Early days, early days.
Anyway, here is an infographic from the Simpliflying team to showcase the results: