Social Listening, Internet Culture & Fast Food
Table of Contents
Fast food companies, social media, and social listening
Fast Food companies are, in today’s world, a cultural cornerstone. Be it McDonald’s M, Taco Bell’s Bell, Wendy’s Wendy, or Burger King’s paper crowns, these symbols are identifiable all over the world. Strangely enough, McDonald’s ties the world together in more ways than we care to imagine. Be it Croatia, Brazil, or India, a McDonald’s will surely be spotted at one place or the other.
Going by their omnipresent nature, it seems they wouldn’t put in a lot of effort into marketing, right? Wrong! Fast food companies are winning the social media game like no other industry (other than Skittles, maybe). These brands utilize Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Big Data Analytics in the most creative way to embrace the meme culture and engage with millennials and the Gen-Z in their language.
On Twitter, they constantly deliver moments that will forever be etched in the annals of internet history. Let’s look at some of the best moments of fast-food Twitter and learn about how they leverage advanced technologies like Social Listening & Brand Monitoring to always nail online presence.
Taco bell going after brands on twitter
Remember that time when being a ‘Grammar Nazi’ was a thing on the internet? People went around correcting spelling, punctuations, and grammar on Facebook posts and uneditable Tweets. This wasn’t too long ago, and Taco Bell was taking advantage of it while also roasting other brands that hinted even slightly towards the fast-food brand.
Case in point: Taco Bello corrects a grammatical error made by fellow fast-food brand White Castle while replying to supermodel Chrissy Teigen.
And here are some more moments of Taco Bell being savage on Twitter.
@MeanGirlsQuotes God, Karen you're so stupid.
— Taco Bell (@tacobell) July 12, 2012
Burger king’s ruthless promotional tweets
People can get easily bored with the traditional methods of promoting new services and products. This is one area social media has completely revolutionized. Burger King’s Twitter feed is a testament to this.
Case in point: After Wendy’s discontinued serving Spicy Chicken Nuggets, Burger Kings launched its own. And, to inform people about their new offering, Burger Kings replied to Twitter users complaining about Wendy’s dropping the item from its menu. Here’s an example:
too late. pic.twitter.com/q2xjvyMGmH
— Burger King (@BurgerKing) October 10, 2017
good thing OUR spicy nuggets are here starting 10/12 for $1.49.
— Burger King (@BurgerKing) October 10, 2017
After Wendy’s announced its ‘4 for $4’ deal, Burger King promoted its ‘5 for $4’ deal like this:
5 for $4, because 5 is better than 4. pic.twitter.com/BZe8JFbKjm
— Burger King (@BurgerKing) January 21, 2016
Also, how can we forget when Burger King UK roasted billionaire rapper Kanye West for saying McDonald’s is his favorite restaurant? This three-word tweet has over 910,000 likes!
Wendy’s roasting competitors at every turn!
When it comes to acing social media presence, Wendy’s isn’t far behind at all. The fast-food brand has clapped back at a number of its competitors over the years. In fact, Wendy’s practically started this trend!
Case in point: This tweet by Wendy’s replying to a user and essentially calling McDonald’s literal garbage.
— Wendy's (@Wendys) January 3, 2017
No wonder this savage tweet has over 20,000 likes and over 10,600 retweets! Now, that’s a viral tweet.
Here are other times Wendy’s went after competition and, in the Twitter sense, annihilated them. Notice the number of likes on the tweets below some of which are over 600,000!
You don't have to bring them into this just because you forgot refrigerators existed for a second there.
— Wendy's (@Wendys) January 2, 2017
And this savage reply by Wendy’s to Burger King on their (aforementioned) ‘5 for $4’ deal:
@bguerns13 edible food
— Wendy's (@Wendys) January 22, 2016
Mcdonald’s knows what’s up!
McDonald’s social media presence is that of a teenager who’s always in touch with the latest, hippest trends. The fast-food brand has jumped on almost every meme trend even giving its followers an existential crisis when that was the in-thing.
Case in point: This tweet by McDonald’s made Twitter users question the sad inevitability of growing up and gradually losing one’s childhood.
one day you ordered a Happy Meal for the last time and you didn't even know it
— McDonald’s (@McDonalds) November 24, 2020
Or, the time McDonald’s used another popular Twitter trend to tweet:
it’s always “when is the McRib coming back” and never “how are you doing person who runs the McDonald’s account”
— McDonald’s (@McDonalds) October 23, 2020
With over 132,000 likes, the above tweet was engaged by regular users and brands like HBO, Adobe, Xbox, IBM, Instagram, Walgreens, Microsoft, Grub Hub, Pizza Hut, and Facebook. And there are more gems, like the ones below.
If curling up with a warm breakfast sandwich is wrong, I don’t want to be right. pic.twitter.com/7Ul0eQ7gyj
— McDonald’s (@McDonalds) February 3, 2017
welcome to McDonald's what can i get you? pic.twitter.com/iIgd8J5QIW
— McDonald’s (@McDonalds) December 1, 2020
we have a joke about our soft serve machine but we're worried it won't work
— McDonald’s (@McDonalds) August 11, 2020
The role of social listening
How do brands come across so many tweets that don’t even mention or tag them? For instance, the reply Wendy’s gave to Old Spice didn’t mention Wendy’s anywhere. It only mentioned ‘fire sauce’, a sauce produced by the fast-food chain. This is where Social Listening & Brand Monitoring comes in.
There are thousands of tweets that fast-food brands are tagged in at any given hour. There’s no way for an agent to manually search for tweets to send witty replies to. With Social Listening, you can create keywords and categories you want to constantly ‘listen’ to.
You can also meticulously track competitor brands, as you can see all fast-food companies do, to create wonderfully funny and healthily competitive tweet battles that build brand image and online presence. Zomato, for example, is a company that does this very well!
How can locobuzz help?
Locobuzz is a new-generation Unified Customer Experience (CX) Platform with Social Listening & Brand Monitoring capabilities topped by none other in the market. It helps you spot trends, ‘listen’ to your choice of words across digital platforms, and help a brand’s marketing team use their creativity in the best way possible.
Sure, human creativity cannot be matched by Artificial Intelligence (AI), but an AI-powered unified CX management platform like Locobuzz eliminates the cumbersome, tiring, and manual processes of social media management providing brands with the opportunity to enchant audiences, leverage the memes, and build a loyal customer base.
