McDonald’s Social Media Director Looks for The EXIT on Twitter

Sometimes brands use social media as a way to invite themselves into your life  when they are not at all welcome. We wouldn’t force someone to like us in real life, so why do we do this on social? This is the equivalent of meeting someone and inviting yourself to hangout with their family the same weekend. This is referred to as the Courtship of Social Media, in the book written by Gina Luttrell, Social Media: How to Engage, Share, and Connect. There is an effective way to engage with consumers without being invasive, as public relations practitioners we must find the balance and pursue the proper form of engagement.

Attaining followers is great, but we must also track how much engagement we receive on our social pages; you can purchase followers on Twitter, so having 50k followers could mean nothing if there is no engagement, obviously, the goal is positive engagement.  The important aspect to monitoring social media is by a few things:

• The conversation-what are people saying about you?
  • Good? Bad? Neutral?
  • The goal should be to get your customer ranting and raving about you.
• How many Twitter followers do you have? How many likes on Facebook?
• Who is engaged with your content?
  • Celebrities? Government? Consumers?
  • What is their Klout score?

Everyone has a hashtag, some are created by the company, and some are created by angry consumers. We can’t even enjoy an episode of our favorite show without seeing their hashtag on the bottom corner. Recently, an angry McDonalds customer received a cheeseless order of cheese sticks from a California restaurant (there is now a lawsuit regarding the missing cheese). He took to Twitter with the hashtag #WheresTheCheese. This sparked quite the conversation on Twitter, other angry customers started posting photos of their cheeseless sticks. Companies like TGI Friday’s and A&W took advantage of the situation and tweeted out from their accounts photos of cheese sticks saying they’ve “always had the cheese” and “cheese comes guaranteed in our products”. This is an example of a negative conversation happening on a company’s social media. This was not the first time a hashtag has backfired on McDonald’s, nor the first time a social media disaster has happened to other companies (a few of my favorites). In 2012, McDonald’s promoted a hashtag #McDStories which quickly turned into customers telling horrific stories about experiences after eating at McDonalds. After 2 hours, McDonald’s social media director pulled the hashtag and ended promoting it in Twitter’s newsfeed.  

Watching people fail on social media is extremely entertaining, but we should also give credit to those who do social media well. There are plenty of businesses out there who do social very well without being invasive or annoying.

Red Bull is my personal favorite for doing social well. They promote vivacious living, any and every sport you can think of, and rarely every self promote. They have 58.8k Twitter followers because those people want to follow them.

Old Spice is another brand who does social well. They engage will their followers as well as post daily with content that is not all self promoting. They have 225k Twitter followers and do well with engagement as well as current content for their channel.

Who doesn’t love Taco Bell? For some, it may be a guilty pleasure, or a late night snack no one knows about, either way, they engage with all 1.67 million of their followers and post content daily. They promote their new menu items as well as their other social channels such as snapchat but it is not over bearing and something that would get annoying. They RT a lot of their mentions which makes people want to tweet at them with the chance of it being seen by 1.67 million followers.