Summary This proposal is meant to present the leadership at Gary/Chicago International Airport with the need to look at and analyze their social media presence. To do this, I look at small similar sized airports in terms of infrastructure, and located outside of large cities, and compare their social media activity with that of GYY, and look at the number of flights at the same airports. I. Importance of Social Media Social media is something that the Gary/Chicago International Airport (GYY) can no longer overlook, and will prove to be a valuable tool for the success of the airport. Social media is important to attract both passengers, and airlines to our airport. A vast majority of marketers agree that the utilization of social networking brings exposure to businesses (Smith, Blazovichand, & Smith, 2015), and it would be no different for us at the airport. Throughout the world, there have been successful movements in politics brought about by the use of social media (Bennett, …show more content…
II. State of Social Media The use of social media throughout the world has bolstered significantly. In 2012, roughly 28.5% of large airports, and 19.9% of public airports, utilized some social media platform (Halpern, 2012), while today, a significant airport that does not have some social media presence is the exception. With social media, the passengers are able to contribute to the experience of flying, and airports are viewing passengers as their own customers instead of customers of an airline (Wattanacharoensil, Schuckert, & Graham, 2016). The most popular platforms used by airports are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube. In 2012, GYY had a very strong LinkedIn for our size (Halpern, 2012), but this has fallen, and should be considered for