Perhaps the reason why KLM seems to perform so well in social media is that it thinks -- dreaded phrase -- outside of the box with almost all of its initiatives. Step forward, then: Planes.

The carrier teamed up with the folk behind the latest Disney movie Planes (basically, Pixar's Cars in-the-air) to persuade school kids to draw their own images to accompany promotions to go alongside the release of the movie in the Netherlands.

But rather than just host the pictures on its incredibly popular Facebook page (4.2 million fans and counting), as probably 99% of the world's other airlines would do, KLM brought 300 kids to one of its hangars and screened the film for them on-board an aircraft.

So what, you might say?

It then re-enacted some of the special effects, weather and other elements from various scenes of the film from special rigs assembled outside of the aircraft, so the children could get a pseudo-3D experience.

Of course, part of the idea behind it is to tug at the heart strings of parents when they see the ad, but also because KLM has an uncanny habit of scoring big when it puts all its content on social channels such as YouTube.

When Disney did a promo with American Airlines for the same movie earlier this year, some 380,000 views were captured across two clips.

KLM's effort has secured 870,000 in just five days.