Feel Finnair

In July, Finnair turned over its Instagram feed over to staff members, allowing them to take over the account and post destination content. Finnair has been periodically running these since 2015, with this being the ffth month long takeover since then.

Finnair tells us that in addition to these month long take-overs, the airline regularly stages shorter employee takeovers.

Examples of the July take-over included Pajaree aka Pajis, a Thai-Finnish cabin crew member who showcased her top three destinations for the beneft of airline’s Instagram followers. Over the following days, she then posted about Lisbon, Osaka, and Bangkok.

She was followed by St Petersburg (Russia) based client manager, Yaroslava Belyaeva, who shared St Petersburg travel tips.

Finnair says that it regularly advertises the take-overs via employee social network Yammer. This year there were more than 50 staff members who wanted to take part.

The communications team then selected ones who refected different roles, destinations and nationalities, with the aim of showing as much of Finnair as possible.

We wondered whether the employees doing the take-over had to submit posts for approval through a third party system and the answer is they do not.

According to Finnair, “the person who takes over the account gets our IG takeover guidelines, the do’s and don’t’s, and is responsible for the content. The content is basically decided by the host, and what kind of storytelling he/she opts to do.

Basically the idea behind FeelFinnair is that we all feel Finnair differently, and the feeling should show. We also do collaboration with infuencers, and the same applies to them.

Finnair told us that they see an increase in followers and positive and employee engagement during employee take-overs, and that they intend carrying on with the activity as “there are thousands of interesting Finnair stories to be told.”

Finnair is of course not the only airline that runs employee take-overs, but it does it really well. Finnair should be commended for trusting its employees to tell their own stories, without having to jump through corporate approval hoops (clearly they are vetted beforehand).

This then comes through in the content, which looks authentic and unscripted, as well as in the engagement rates.