This study empirically investigates marketing activities on social media of American airline firms and assesses their impact on firm performance and customer satisfaction. More than 3 million tweets are retrieved from the firms' Twitter timelines over 60 months from 2017 to 2021. These tweets are then analyzed using machine learning algorithms and big data analytics. The results reveal that, in general, social media marketing positively affects both online customer engagement and customer satisfaction. Furthermore, the analyses show that online customer engagement enhances firms' customer satisfaction. The findings also show that online customer engagement fully mediates the impact of a company's social media marketing on its customer satisfaction score. This study offers marketing scholars and practitioners new insights into the investment, design, implementation, and management of social media marketing efforts. and their influence within the firm and on online customer engagement, which affects customer satisfaction. Our findings imply that American airline companies' use of social media to boost trendiness, customization, and entertainment pays off in terms of enhancing customer engagement with brand related social media content.