Why Marketers Should Follow Fast Food Accounts on Social Media

Sally Hogshead says, “different is better than better.” She’s talking about success within careers, but it applies to social media marketing and marketing in general. Successful social media campaigns that come to my head are the ones that challenged the status quo and took risks that paid off.

Think about Wendy’s Twitter account. Their voice is unapologetic and unforgettable, setting them apart from the competition who lack that distinct character in their Tweets. Choosing to cultivate a fun but aggressive voice is a considerable risk that could have caused harmful rhetoric between brands and potential customers. Choosing to be different was a necessary risk that captivated audiences and laid the foundation for brands to develop their unique voice and become characters on the social media stage.

Back in the days of Facebook and Tumblr transcendence, many younger millennials took to Reddit, where Reddit filtered out the unsavory bits of the internet, and you could decide what content showed up in your feed and if “that Tweet” should go viral through a BuzzFeed article. This era of “too cool for social” was when I stumbled upon a screenshot of this tweet.

At the time, I didn’t use Twitter, but this Tweet still made its way into my tiny social media circle. It resonated with me so much that I decided to write a blog about it today, although this was years ago. KFC made a definitive choice to be different and launched an entire social media campaign that echoed through the corners of the internet by the tiniest decision to follow the spice girls and some guys named Herb.

When building impressive social media campaigns, especially when they are organic, the main goal is to increase brand awareness and gather leads at the top of the sales funnel. Additionally, KFC is cultivating a voice and identity for themselves that differs from the norm. By defining their brand identity on social media, they have the opportunity to focus on other goals like improving customer loyalty.

KFC used several KPIs to measure the success of this campaign. For the branded, fun run-down with “The Colonel’s” voice narrating, watch this video. For the boring typed-up version of KPI’s from said video, read ahead:

The story showed up in over 360,000 publications across the world.
The campaign garnered an estimated 2.42 billion impressions.

The video didn’t show the return on followers, and a little bit of internet scrubbing shows that they didn’t publish that metric, but I’m sure someone on their marketing team was following their follower count closely. KFC launched this insanely creative campaign that cost nothing to cultivate brand awareness and improve customer loyalty.

The best way to measure that goal is through impressions, follower count, engagements, and potentially share of voice. KFC also decided to include an additional metric of the number of appearances in online publications because the campaign had grown so large, similar to the social share of voice, but spans globally.

KFC planned what to do when someone found their sneaky easter egg, sending them a silly painting. I don’t think they knew the brand awareness impact a creative campaign like this might have. However, even though KFC may have blown their KPI goals out of the water, they have to readjust their goals and numbers for future campaigns, which average marketers have to learn from an excellent case study like this.

Hootsuite warns of the dangers of “set and forget” automation when it comes to social media, but the same principle applies to setting goals for social media campaigns. Many marketers have the same goals for lengths of time, but their business grows or slows down based on numerous factors. Constantly checking and adjusting your KPIs and deciding if the ones you’re using are useful for your social media goals is how you know you accurately measure your successes or failures. By being precise, critical, and thoughtful, you can build campaigns that genuinely fit your business needs.

Looking at this case study of KFC’s social media campaign, marketers learn that investing time and thought into a social media campaign versus throwing money at sponsored content pays off. Being better is good, but being different is better. Marketers also learn that measurement is fluid and is a balance of constantly checking and adjusting based on business needs and adding or removing KPIs based on goals.