In 2022 we made it our mission to find our fans where they were on the internet and engage with them in a truly “always on” way across all social platforms. We wanted it to feel like @mcdonalds was showing up everywhere and doing everything all of the time. If we did our jobs right, we’d be broadening the range of the @mcdonalds Community Manager’s voice and making new @mcdonalds fans out of people in the corners of the internet that McDonald’s hadn’t touched yet.
To make it feel like @mcdonalds was showing up everywhere on the internet all of the time we gave ourselves two main objectives:
Find and follow every new and niche community on the internet
Stay tapped into every new trend across all platforms
Attempting to stay tuned to every corner of the internet is no easy feat. To do so we created a daily morning brainstorm meeting where every member of our team showed up with the most interesting people, trends, memes, etc. that were popping up on their own personal feeds the night before. These sessions generated
many of our top posts of the year and helped @mcdonalds insert itself into conversations happening in gaming, crypto, and more.
With gaming, for example, we began tailoring more of our organic content towards our follower-base’s new interest. We created a custom @xbox controller for stealing fries, a readerboard announcing the @destinythegame release, and custom artwork for fans of @finalfantasyvii.
Our first interaction in the crypto space came when we tweeted our concern for crypto social media managers during the first major Bitcoin downturn. This earned @mcdonalds a lot of press attention and a lot of engagements with new users on Twitter. The next day Elon Musk urged us via Twitter to accept Dogecoin, and we cleverly responded urging Telsa to accept our made up currency “Grimacecoin”.
We also made a conscious attempt to make sure that our tweets and captions were as interactive and shareable as possible. Something as simple as tweeting “bring back _____” or "tag someone as extra as a 7th McNugget" would result in our content being sent around to places we didn’t know existed.
We even managed to take over the McDonald’s Times Square billboard space and turn it into a place where we could display our best tweets from that week. Not only did this allow us to reach to people who may not even be on social media but it gave us an entirely new platform for the CM to write to and engage with.
Our campaign for the rerelease of Szechuan Sauce was another instance where we got to push our own Community Management boundaries. Not only did we listen to our followers and bring back a product that they were demanding, but we did so in a way where it felt like an exclusive online drop where the community manager was “the plug” standing in between them and their favorite sauce. We even went as far as to create a public phone number that allowed fans to text with the CM and get exclusive updates on the drop before anyone else.
On TikTok we’ve adapted to the platform’s trend of unpolished, behind-the-scenes content and began producing more videos showing fans what the daily life of the @mcdonalds Community Manager actually looks like.
The year-end results were a success. As an account that was already followed by over 4.3 million users on Twitter, turning around numbers like
Follower Gain: 364,936
Reach: 117,067,466
Engagements: 3,305,219
means that not only are we finding new people but we’re engaging with them in a way that they’re responding positively to.
On TikTok we saw a massive jump in followers with over +852,593 new users joining in 2022. A 45.12% rate of follower growth compared to where we ended the year in 2021.
We also saw great success in our Szechuan Sauce campaign, which led to over 420 million reach across all channels, record-breaking engagements on our Twitter, and the biggest surge in McDonald’s App downloads in 2022.
Between our all-time viral posts and constant engagement with our community, we succeeded in making @mcdonalds one of the most fan-forward brands across all platforms.
