At Logan Airport, tweeting is taking off

(Wendy Maeda/Globe Staff)Tim Saccoia and Lisa Brown are two of the five people on the Massachusetts Port Authority’s social media team. They follow Logan Airport’s Twitter account from their East Boston offices.

Want to know where to get a burrito in Terminal C at Logan International Airport? Wondering if a storm has delayed your flight?

Follow @bostonlogan on Twitter, and chances are you’ll find the answer.

Logan has more followers on the microblogging site Twitter than any other major airport in the country — 4,000 and counting — and is second in the nation only to Richmond International Airport’s nearly 6,000 followers, according to the aviation consultancy AirGate Solutions. Worldwide, Logan ranks fourth, behind Heathrow and Manchester airports in England.

Logan’s five-person social media team tweets about anything from flight cancellations and airfare sales to information about book signings and Christmas carolers. The team also reaches out to the captive audience of people tweeting from the airport who are looking for the lost and found — or are just plain ecstatic about their parking spot.

Follower Mika Pyyhkala, who is blind, recently sent the Logan Twitter team a message about a Wi-Fi problem he was having with his voice-over software, and he heard back from them an hour later. Soon he had a temporary solution, followed by an inquiry from the airport’s Wi-Fi vendor.

Pyyhkala, who is president of the National Federation of the Blind of Massachusetts, was impressed. “You typically don’t have good results if you just call the 800 number for a company,’’ he said.

Lisa Brown, the social media manager at Logan who handles most of the tweeting duties, said people are often taken aback when they get a personal response: “A lot of people still see it as this big bureaucracy.’’

She sees the occasional “I hate Logan Airport’’ comments — which she usually responds to by saying, “Can you be more specific?’’ But the majority are surprisingly positive, she said.

The Boston airport’s numbers hardly rival those for Twitter’s most popular users. Actor Ashton Kutcher, for instance, has more than 5 million followers. Still, among airports, Logan has a healthy following, largely credited to the variety of content on its Twitter feed.

Logan has partnered with airlines to give away free trips — currently the airport and SATA have a promotion for a vacation to Lisbon, airfare and six nights’ hotel stay included. Logan even let its followers know when the movie “Hot Tub Time Machine’’ was available at the Redbox rental station in Terminal B.

This attention to detail goes a long way in the airport Twitter world. Officials at Richmond International, which tops the Twitter-follower list, send out quirky, personal messages, such as one asking a passenger if he had a 17-pocket jacket to avoid baggage fees.

Social media are all about building community and relationships, and small airports like Richmond’s — which has 23 million fewer annual passengers than Logan but 2,000 more Twitter followers — with fewer layers of bureaucracy, tend to do a better job at this, said Robert Cook, managing director of AirGate Solutions. Small airports in Akron, Ohio, and Harrisburg, Pa., for instance, have far more followers than major airports in New York and Chicago; Miami International Airport doesn’t even have a Twitter account.

But the competition isn’t that fierce. Orlando International Airport, which has the fifth-highest number in the country, hasn’t posted a new tweet since November. Baltimore Washington International Airport’s tweets tend toward the practical. One recurring post: “Current Conditions at BWI Marshall are normal with no significant delays.’’

Most passengers don’t have a choice which airport they fly out of, so why do airports bother tweeting at all?

It’s all about money, of course. Airports benefit from attracting followers and telling them where to shop because airports get a cut of the retail business, said Cook of AirGate Solutions. “As retail goes up, their percentage will creep up,’’ he said.

But most passengers just see the feel-good side of it.

When Justin Levy tweets about packing to leave his Braintree home for one of his several weekly trips through Logan, he often gets a “Have a nice flight’’ message. He even got a “Congratulations’’ announcement over the loudspeaker at the JetBlue gate when he and his wife were leaving for their honeymoon.

“It humanizes brands, and it humanizes places,’’ said Levy, who is in the social media business at New Marketing Labs in Canton. “Who ever thought you could have an enjoyable experience with an airport?’’