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LAX's New Facebook Launch Raises Some Questions

September 26, 2011 at 3:05 PM | by | Comments (0)

Ever since someone stupidly convinced Orbitz that they needed to invest in a Facebook application two years ago—the premise being that people would want to share their travel plans with all of their high school and college and work and random stalkerish Facebook friends—we've kind of given up on complaining about meaningless social media projects. Organizations will build Facebook pages, even if there's no real need for those types of organization to have Facebook pages, because that's what organizations do now.

Fair enough.

So let's quickly glide past how we don't really understand why LAX needs a new Facebook page, which is something they just launched. The Los Angeles airport has had a Twitter account since 2009, which makes perfect sense because people are used to going to Twitter for breaking news in general and for travel news specifically (checking an airline's Twitter feed for delays is now just something we do).

Our real question is: who are the 28,864 people who are actually fans of the page?

The airport's official statement on the new page—which combines their old "Governmental" page with their old "Places" location—says that "fans and followers can now check-in, receive up-to-the-minute information on airport conditions, videos, photos, flight delay, travel-related news, and much more."

We understand the check-in part as we're Foursquare people ourselves, but that was already being taken care of. And before you ask about whether you're now supposed to Like posts about flight delay info, note that the top post right now is "Morning! Due to weather conditions, flights from ORD and EWR are experiencing delays." And that it does indeed have 8 Likes.

LAX has also left the wall open for user generated posts, presumably because no one there has ever seen the YouTube comments section. Naturally it's filled with contributions like "show me something good about terminals 6, 7, 8...", "wkwkwkwkwk", and "good los angeles." Social media is magic.

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