Social media has been a boon for coach and bus operators. Across both cases, it delivers engagement with customers, service updates, marketing messages, sales opportunities, and many other good things.
Now it seems that social media is going through an awkward spot. Twitter is in crisis. Some businesses and organisations, including routeone, have left Twitter or are in the process of doing so.
Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to move Facebook to a Twitter-esque user self-policing model of sorts suggests that the result may be similar for that platform. Zuckerberg himself says that such an adjustment means that Facebook will be able to “catch less bad stuff.” Not every business wants its brand potentially sitting alongside such “bad stuff.”
Some may view these changes as little to worry about and par for the course on always-evolving cloud platforms. The block function makes avoiding the lunatic fringe easy enough. Other platforms are also available, albeit not yet with the reach that Facebook and Twitter deliver.
That is the critical point for the coach and bus industry. Customer communications and marketing efforts are now heavily reliant on those two channels. How do those operators and businesses that wish to leave one, or both, maintain their cost-effective B2C brand exposure?
Apps and associated push notifications may be suitable successors in some instances for bus operators. Indeed, they are already used widely. Availability of ‘white label’ apps brings them to even the smallest of companies, many of which utilise them successfully. Bluesky is also in the frame.
For coach operators, where socials are a key tool in selling day trips and holidays, the choice is different: Accept what else comes with those platforms and offset it against the free advertising that they bring, or go back to the drawing board on the customer marketing strategy. Neither may be overly appealing, although equally there is no right or wrong.
One positive for the coach sector is that face-to-face and brochure-based sales for tours and day trips remain strong, no doubt as a byproduct of the customer demographic in that segment.
Images – shared by social channels – from multiple operators show excellent turnouts at brochure launches and similar events. That, combined with the prominence of apps, means that any social media crisis is of moderate concern to coach and bus – but it is still something to keep an eye on.
