How Airbus Group Unlocked Its E-Fan On Social Media

In the age of digital media, it’s become almost unimaginable for airframe/ engine OEMs and airline press offices not to design launch campaigns around social media. First flights now have their own dedicated hashtags on Twitter, their own landing pages and live video feeds.  Manufacturing milestones that were once the preserve of staff newsletters and intranets are also now rolled out to the masses of aviation enthusiasts on social media.

Everyone is looking for new ways to innovate and stand out from an increasingly noisy social media backdrop. So when the #wemakeitfly hashtag started appearing all over my Twitter stream a couple of weeks ago with images of a 'Tweetometer', I was intrigued.

Airbus Group,  parent of Airbus which had previously utilized social media for the first flight of the A350, took to Twitter to publicize the first public flight of its electric E-Fan experimental aircraft, with a campaign tagged #wemakeitfly.

Jean-Vincent Reymondon, Airbus Group social media manager, told me the aim of the campaign was to spread brand awareness online, engage with key influencers and media, and create a cutting-edge innovative way of presenting content. “We wanted to create buzz before the event without giving too much away. We relied on our social media platforms (mainly Twitter) to engage our audience and invite them to take part in our campaign and release content on a dedicated landing page.”

The page - http://wemakeitfly.airbus-group.com - displayed a ‘Tweetometer’, or a speedometer for tweets, showing how much energy up to 60 kilowatts of tweets and retweets produced. When the Tweetometer reached its limit, it unlocked content on the page.

Throughout the three days of the campaign, the page displayed an advent calendar-style set of batteries with content still to be unlocked. The next day’s content was hidden but a call to action explained how to unlock it via the  #wemakeitfly tweets. Twitter avatars of those who tweeted the hashtag were displayed on the page background and their tweets included in a Twitterfeed on the page, encouraging more user participation.

Reymondon says the campaign reached over one million people on Twitter. “It was a great achievement and helped push our content and brand image to audiences who may not have seen/read/watched it through traditional methods."

Airbus Group works with Konkz Agency for its digital campaigns.