INTRODUCTION

This paper discusses a study of social media usage within the context of a large public transport operator. This study involved fieldwork within three subsidiary companies of FirstGroup alongside a content analysis of the individual Twitter feeds each subsidiary operates, and the ways in which these led to passenger engagement via conversation. The wider role of social media in public transport will firstly be discussed in order to provide context for how it is currently being used elsewhere. Further background information about the transport operator that forms the case study for this paper will then be described. Following this is an explanation of the study methodology to develop an understanding of social media in a transport operator context. The discussion will then move on to refiguring notions of social through emerging strategies for utilising social media in relation to dialogue, information and identity. Finally, a set of recommendations for other transport companies utilising social media will be provided.

THE ROLE OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN PUBLIC TRANSPORT

Recent years have seen an explosion in the use of social media as a means to communicate public transport information. A recent survey (Accenture 2013) noted that passengers desire more frequent communication from, and greater access to, transportation providers via social media. By utilising such channels, operators can gain valuable insight into the passenger experience including their attitudes and behaviours, while travellers can alert others to delays and disruption at an early stage – often before the operator even becomes aware of a problem.

There has been previous work on understanding the passenger experience for long-distance coach trips from an ethnographic perspective (Ochs, Gaudron, and Cruz 2013) but this did not consider how social media would compliment the service offering. Another study explored the use of social media with focus groups involving rail passengers exploring how Twitter is increasingly important as an additional channel of information during disruption (Passenger Focus and Abellio 2012). This approach used a series of example tweets and scenarios to gather passenger opinions but did not evaluate the passenger experience whilst in use. Further work has sought to use social media as a means to predict the journey planning demands of passengers (Alesiani, Gkiotsalitis, and Baldessari 2014), inform transport policy (Grant-Muller et al. 2014) and facilitate the travel operator’s response (e.g. cancelling or rescheduling services) during a major disruption such as a natural disaster (Guan and Chen 2014).

Social media is now being used by many transport agencies to support communication with their customers. Analysis of usage appears to indicate a preference for Twitter rather than Facebook as Facebook is often considered too personal and social (Passenger Focus and Abellio 2012).

TRANSPORT OPERATOR CONTEXT

FirstGroup were the focus of this study, the world’s largest public transport operator in private hands, which is headquartered in Aberdeen, UK. Within the UK, FirstGroup provide both bus and rail services; in the USA and Canada they operate school buses and inter-city bus services. Their UK bus operation consists of 18 subsidiary companies that operate independently of each other providing local and inter-city services. The subsidiary companies that were the subject of this study were First Aberdeen, First Glasgow and First South East and Central Scotland; they are based in Aberdeen, Glasgow, and Edinburgh respectively. First Aberdeen serves an urban population of on average 50,000 customers a day from a single depot in the city with 160 buses. First Glasgow also has an urban setting but serves a much greater population from multiple depots situated across the city using over 1000 buses. First South East and Central Scotland serves a population of on average 87,000 customers per day, distributed over a much wider geographic area including rural areas and a large city (Edinburgh) from two depots with 420 buses in operation. The areas covered from services operated by these subsidiaries dictate the information needs of passengers in the various locations (Pender et al. 2014). For example, in a rural setting there is less infrastructure so not all bus stops are easily identifiable and there is limited information detailing the service provision. Regardless of the area, making use of the real-time and two-way nature of social media can be beneficial for passengers. Twitter is the main form of social media being used by these operators to communicate with their passengers due to its strength in facilitating real-time communication and less personal nature of material posted in comparison to Facebook (Passenger Focus and Abellio 2012).

STUDY METHODOLOGY

A mixed-method approach was adopted to gather data for the study. An analysis of the Twitter feeds operated by the three First subsidiaries could have only shown the outward facing identities provided by the operators; however, a comparison of material showing what the operators are outwardly communicating against their strategy and day-to-day running of the social media accounts was desired. In order to achieve this, it was necessary to supplement the data gathered online with field data from multiple rounds of workplace interviews and observations. This also provided an exciting opportunity to compare the data generated from the three different company locations.

The workplace interviews were designed for the operators of the social media accounts so included questions on the usage of Twitter, the account operator’s practise, crafting of content, identity management, audience and the implications for the wider company. The rationale for these questions was to understand the company’s strategy for the use of social media and how real-time travel information flowed through the organisation. The questions were initially developed by engaging in an informal chat with a representative from FirstGlasgow’s marketing team and then returning for further visits with a more defined interview protocol. Additional follow up interviews with other staff at First Glasgow and those at First Aberdeen and First South East and Central Scotland helped to further refine this protocol as particular topics started to move into the foreground.

The use of content analysis was deemed appropriate for studying the Twitter feeds as it helped to categorise and understand a large dataset of mainly qualitative material obtained from the tweets on the operator’s accounts. It was recognised from the beginning that storing outgoing tweets from the operator’s account alone would be insufficient for understanding the full interaction between operators and passengers, so the other side of the conversation involving the travelling public would also have to be captured. These were the public messages sent directly to the operator using the ‘@mention’¹ mechanism of Twitter. A first round of storing the operator’s Twitter conversations for each of the companies was carried out over a weeklong period. This was achieved through tracing back all the conversations the operators had engaged in over that time through their Twitter profile page and extracting this data into a spread sheet. This was used to help define an appropriate schema for categorising the tweets and to generate requirements for collecting the content on a larger scale using the Twitter API². As part of this research a Twitter Monitoring Infrastructure was developed to collect the tweets sent from and mentioning the accounts FirstinGlasgow, FirstAberdeen, and FirstScotland. These tweets were stored in a database containing the message content and all of the associated metadata such as the tweet author’s username, location (if available), Twitter client used to send the tweet, and tweet time. The tweets were then manually classified using a key to indicate the themes of both the individual tweets and the overall conversations. The key was created using a grounded theory approach and contained four categories, which were ‘promotion’, ‘feedback’, ‘travel information’ and ‘response’. Each of these categories had many subcategories so for example promotion included ‘morning greeting’, ‘sign off’, ‘press release’, ‘chat’ and ‘happy staff’. The individual tweets were assigned to two categories where necessary. Additionally, the full conversations between the operator and the passengers are assigned a further category. The key was generated through multiple iterations of data analysis and helped to indicate the thematic range of conversations taking place.

FIGURE 1. Word cloud visualisation of the FirstinGlasgow Twitter feed.

A triangulation activity was carried out after the fieldwork and content analysis had taken place. This enabled the staff who operate the Twitter feeds to compare the understanding generated through the fieldwork activity with the outcomes of the content analysis. Some of the content analysis data for the triangulation was presented as a word cloud visualisation showing the Twitter feed from each account (an example is shown in Fig. 1). The themes that were generated from the content analysis were also discussed with the individual operators to understand how they related to their work.

REFIGURING NOTIONS OF SOCIAL

The use of social media in a transport context can push away from mere marketing usage and towards customer support, aid, care and possibly more meaningful customer engagement. One key aspect of social media is its ability to build a relationship with customers that extends beyond the duration of their actual journeys to span across multiple service touch points. The provision of real-time travel information to customers via this channel is also a significant advantage as it can facilitate a fast response to events from the operator. Further, the identity with which the operators portray themselves is particularly important due to the public nature of the customer interactions taking place. The next three sub-sections will describe these aspects of social media usage from a transport operator’s perspective.

Persistent Conversation

Real-time social media conversations help transport operators accompany passengers during their journeys. The Twitter feeds strive to humanise the passenger’s experience of the transport service rather than simply acting as a commoditised service with which the passenger interaction is purely functional. This aspect was something that all of the companies who were involved in the study shared experience of.