Fast food restaurants earned their name for a reason. They pride themselves on getting hungry customers in and out quickly. When it comes to social, however, it appears that many fast food joints have rejected the idea of a timely response altogether. Unmetric recently did some digging to determine the best and worst fast food franchises currently taking on social media. Here are the highlights of their study:
- Burger King has experienced the fastest growth on Facebook, while burger rival McDonald’s has experienced the fastest growth on Twitter.
- On Facebook, West Coast favorite In-N-Out Burger scores highest when it comes to engagement. For Twitter, Chipotle scores biggest.
- When it comes to answering to a fan or follower’s question, comment, etc., McDonald’s only took 29 minutes to reply! In stark contrast, rival Burger King took nearly 3 days to respond.
- Overall, Unmetric ranked McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Subway, Dunkin Donuts and Baskin Robbins as the best brands on Facebook. Some of those brands have also been declared the best on Twitter: McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Chipotle, Pizza Hut and Dunkin Donuts.
Engagement is a very important part of social media marketing for a brand, and this includes the amount of time that elapses between a consumer’s question and the brand’s response. The fact that McDonald’s is so quick to respond to and engage with fans has helped them enormously. Their social fanbase grew in a short amount of time, and their willingness to engage keeps fans coming back.
Of course, engagement is predicated on the type of content being shared socially. According to this research, questions to followers/fans & “Like this if” structured posts score the best engagement for fast food brands. And although menu updates get few related posts, they also receive relatively high engagement scores.
Timeliness and customer engagement isn’t just important for fast food, though. Even top retail brands could stand to improve in these areas. Check out our full report to see which brands performed best and worst in a recent Facebook customer response study.
