Xiaoning Liang
Irish Centre for Cloud Computing and Commerce, Dublin City University
Dr Xiaoning Liang is a postdoctoral researcher at the Irish Centre for Cloud Computing and Commerce and DCU Business School. Her primary research focus is marketing performance measurement.
This paper explores the impact of Ryanair’s decision to directly participate on Twitter as a brand on the overall sentiment towards the Ryanair brand on Twitter. Ryanair is a low fare airline and is Europe’s largest airline as measured by passenger numbers (Reuters, 2017). To achieve low fares, Ryanair historically adhered strictly to the containment of operating costs which impacts a variety of customer experience and service factors (O’Connell and Williams, 2005). In September 2013, following the publication of a consumer survey ranking Ryanair as the worst brand for customer experience, shareholders voiced concerns that poor customer experience and service would damage sales (Which?, 2013). As a result, Ryanair agreed to review its strategy and improve customer service and engagement. As part of its customer engagement strategy, Ryanair launched its Twitter account on 17 September 2013.
Twitter is an online social networking service that enables users to send and read short 140-character messages (Tweets) to other Twitter users. Due to its features, functionality, large global audience and largely open network, Twitter has been used widely as an effective tool for customer word-of-mouth communication by organizations (Jansen et al., 2009). In the airline sector, it is used widely for marketing, general customer engagement and responding to specific customer queries (Sreenivasan et al. 2012). According to Saif, He, and Alani (2012, p.1), sentiment analysis of Twitter feeds offers the organization “a fast and effective way to monitor the publics’ feelings towards their brand, business, directors etc.” Unsurprisingly, sentiment analysis is used both by practitioners and researchers investigating customer service in the airline industry (Misopoulos et al. 2014).
This paper analyses general Twitter sentiment towards the Ryanair brand six months prior to Ryanair’s launch on Twitter and six months after. Sentiment analysis was employed as a methodology as it provides insights on the orientation (positive/negative) and intensity (strong / weak) of opinions (Pang and Lee 2011). Sentiment analysis provides insight on public attitude, which reflects the offline landscape (Bae and Lee 2012). In this study, a lexicon-based approach was used to analyse Tweets about Ryanair pre- and post- the Twitter participation (Bollen et al. 2011; Gilbert and Karahalios 2010; Tumasjan et al. 2010). Based on analysis of a total of 484,968 Twitter posts, preliminary findings suggest that (i) Twitter users respond to Ryanair brand less negatively after its decision to directly participate on Twitter, and (ii) there are regional differences in sentiment based on a variety of local factors. This study provides a good example of applying data mining techniques in service and customer relationship management (Ngai et al. 2009). The findings suggest that direct active participation on Twitter impacts attitudinal affects, as measured by sentiment, towards brands on that platform. Additionally, such attitudinal change is not regionally uniform and may require multi-local tactics. The findings provide evidence of the value of direct social media participation, in the case of microblogs, and the attitudinal impact on general brand sentiment.
