Social Media Strategy @ McDonald’s – Real time monitoring & quick response

McDonald’s engages actively with their customers and fans actively on various social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, etc. and is a complex task for the company to do so as it operates in 118 countries across the world. Company has to make sure it is sending a consistent and uniform message to its customers across the globe.  According to McDonald's Global Director of Digital and Social Media Sosti Ropaitis, McDonald’s is global decentralized brand and the local marketing teams within each market take their own decisions exclusively for those markets. It is even more required because of the social, cultural changes that each market has and also the different menus that company customizes according to each market requirements. But the company headquarters will take care of the global campaigns related to global sporting events like Olympics and World Cups. Some of the regional or country specific campaigns like the McDonald’s Canada Campaign “Our Food. Your Questions” giving people a chance to ask the company anything about its food are highly successful.

Real time monitoring is essential part of McDonald’s Social Media strategy. Every month, McDonald's tracks between 2.5 million and 3 million conversations on social media sites in an effort to identify consumer trends. The company uses tools like Radian6 and Sprout Social that helped in increase the speed and visibility of certain issues as they emerge.The company relies on true engagement, which is a function of content, context and timeliness. Lot of time is spent on creating real-time content; create unique transparent campaigns that connect with audiences. Internally with the help of Legal teams, company developed guidelines that help in taking advantage of real-time marketing opportunities like celebrities walking into McDonald’s Restaurants and taking pictures with the company products or tweeting about their experience with McDonald’s, the company retweet the original tweet without adding anything to the tweet.

McDonald’s adopted the constant test-and-learn mode, wherein the company tests and evaluates the different marketing messages whenever they are rolling a new product. Company constantly talks about the various attributes of the product rather than the product itself and this engagement drives significant volumes for the new product. Quick response is also essential for the company to survive as the customers have to be answered and also the company needs to control the social conversations across the various social media platforms. McDonald’s also had certain bad experiences earlier with their social media campaigns and the company seems to have learnt lesson and realized the fact that it is better to keep a constant monitoring on the social conversations and respond as and when there is a negative conversation and try contain the damage or else the company’s brand reputation will take a beating. The biggest learning from McDonald’s Strategy is that for quick response on social media platforms first social conversations have to be monitored on a day to day basis and create an internal framework, guidelines and teams that can respond without wasting time.