Objective

United took advantage of several game-changing opportunities during the pandemic, choosing growth and investment during a time when competing airlines chose to stick to the status quo... or even think smaller. With a bold new story to tell, we needed creative forward thinking to share it with the world. Enter an equally bold social media strategy with a clear-cut objective: change customers' hearts and minds through authentic connections online, building a strong community of brand advocates along the way.

United leadership believes in the power of organic social media as a brand-building tool, even as many brands continue to abandon it. This is based on one core strategic insight: Organic presence drives brand affinity in ways paid media just… can’t. That affinity is especially important in an industry that is both ever-changing and deeply personal. People remember how airlines make them feel, even when they’re not at the airport or inflight.

At United, we use community management as the human extension of the United brand. In 2025, we decided to double down on community management as one way to pursue our audacious goal of being not just the world’s most-loved airline brand, but one of the most-loved brands. Period.

Our community management objectives:

• Nurture community growth by engaging people through humor, participation and relevance
• Engage authentically with aviation enthusiasts (“AV Geeks”) and travel audiences
• Maintain a consistent, "uniquely United” voice by translating pop culture through an aviation lens
• Fuel United content, UGC, and storytelling through community engagement

Strategy

United’s community management is an extension of our broader social approach, which is to show up like the best guest at the dinner table and add value to the conversation without overpowering it. We do that every day through a three-part strategy optimized to engage:

• Participate outside the United community. That means engaging in travel and aviation subcultures, lifestyle moments where flying is part of the story and micro-communities that naturally intersect with movement, exploration and shared experiences.
• Treat our brand-owned spaces as engagement engines. Our comment sections are an extension of the content itself and a place where our brand voice and personality come to life.
• Translate culture through an aviation-first lens, consistently connecting pop culture moments back to the realities and rituals of flying.

We have a dedicated team focused solely on community management, staffed by social media/pop culture enthusiasts who are trusted to use judgment, not scripts. In addition to planned activations, we execute content that is enriched by investing in proactive cultural listening to identify and participate in emerging conversations in real time.

Here are a few examples of how understanding and engaging the online community took wing for United in 2025:

• Seized on the virality of the Labubu plush toys by creating content showing them traveling through the airport, lounging in Polaris class and riding baggage carousels. “Labubu coming through-bu” on the carousel sailed right past our benchmarks: 30X more views, 5X more shares and 1.5X more engagement (TikTok); 6X more views and 3.8X more shares (Reels).
• A unique DM request from a customer whose fiancé is a United pilot inspired us to help her surprise him on their wedding day with a one-of-a-kind ring made from retired aircraft material. The team traveled to film the moment, crafting a video that earned 3X outperformance of brand benchmarks on both Instagram and TikTok. By recognizing the significance of this moment for a customer and going above and beyond to make the moment even more meaningful, we cemented brand fandom while generating content that enriched United's broader narrative.
• United’s planned collab with original Mean Girls star Jonathan Bennett on October 3 was quickly redone to humorously address the issue that Taylor Swift’s Life of a Showgirl album dropped the same day. The video, filmed onboard a United plane, became one of our top-performing engagement pieces of brand-owned content. While earning 15.5M views (13.5M organic), we replied to the best of the 1.3M comments from Mean Girls fans, Swifties and travel enthusiasts alike. This moment illustrates our unique approach: The overlap between our audience and cultural drivers Mean Girls and Taylor Swift, we connected this pop culture moment back to flying through humorous content and engagement via comments that grew our brand advocates.

Results

2025 marked a breakout year for community management at United. The work delivered squarely against our objectives of growing community through humor, participation and relevance, engaging authentically with aviation enthusiasts and travel audiences, translating pop culture through an aviation lens and making community engagement a reliable engine for United’s broader cross-platform content and storytelling.

Our approach paid off:

• United's social posts generated 21 million total engagements in 2025, including 181,400 comments. Of note, our team saw a 165% YOY increase in organic engagements.

• As other brands have seen follower growth decline, United saw an increase in followers by 10% YOY, including 12% growth on Instagram and 18% on TikTok.

• We earned 750,000+ reactions purely on the comments we made on other accounts’ posts, identified through daily trendspotting.

• Instagram Reels share rate increased 85% over the brand benchmark, while TikTok shares grew 250% (3.5x YoY), powered by our brand’s distinct, culturally fluent voice.

• Organic impressions increased by 46 million YoY (+25%) and organic plus paid impressions grew by 338 million.

The numbers say it all. From headline-making moments like Taylor Swift’s new album to something as personal as a wedding band crafted from airplane metal, United’s social media soared in 2025 because of one deceptively simple-sounding concept: knowing how to be that guest at the table who listens well, entertains and knows the best conversations are not monologs.

Media