CASE STUDY: Qatar Airways uses Twitter to engage a new audience

Background

Despite being named World’s Best Airline in 2011 and 2012 at Skytrax World Airline awards and securing awards including Best Intercontinental Airline in the 2013 Grand Travel Awards, Qatar Airways felt it needed to rank higher in terms of traveller awareness and consideration.

Aim

Qatar Airways was looking to connect and engage with its audience in a manner they [audience] felt comfortable with. With this in mind, Grey Group Singapore developed a campaign entitled 'Tweet-a-meet', which ran from from 1 to 24 July.

The campaign arose from two insights: given a chance, people can talk endlessly about travel, and few things are as precious as the chance to travel. These facts helped shape the contest, which encouraged the audience to tweet about a destination to win tickets to that destination. The intent was to make Qatar Airways and the destinations that it flies to a part of the travel chatter online.

Execution

The mechanics of the campaign required people to team up with a friend on Twitter to travel with, and choose any of the 120 destinations that Qatar Airways flies to. Then, the team had to start tweeting interesting facts about the destination in a race with other teams.

The team with the highest number of tweets at the end of the race would win tickets to the destination they tweeted about. The brand raised awareness of the competition organically, via social media platforms and PR: it spent no money on advertising.

Results

Tweet-a-meet garnered participation from 165 countries, gaining more than 10,000 followers within a week and recording more than 260,000 tweets in seven days. It received coverage in more than 100 press clippings from 12 different countries.

The execution helped Qatar Airways build a lasting relationship with an audience it had previously not been able to engage with. It also promoted the airline's destinations, including some second-tier cities that the airlines specialises in.

Since its implementation, Tweet-a-meet has won various awards in Singapore and has been chosen as a finalist in the Effie MENA 2013, making Grey Group Singapore the only agency from Asia Pacific to have made the nomination and shortlist for the Middle East-based award.