The Golden Arches Online: Analyzing McDonald’s Effective Use of Social Media

With over 70 million daily customers and almost 41,000 restaurants across the globe, McDonald’s sits at the top of the chart as one of the most successful food service brands in the world. In 2022, the restaurant’s app was downloaded by 40 million people, as reported by QSR magazine. According to the National Center for Health Statistics for Disease Control, statistics reveal that approximately 36.6% of adults in America consume fast food on any given day.

Furthermore, over 68% of fast food customers prefer the convenience of ordering their meals online. That’s about 85 million adults eating fast food every day! With its robust online and offline marketing channels, McDonald’s has been successful in capturing a significant portion of this fast food market. This achievement has contributed to their well-deserved position as one of the foremost fast food brands in the minds of the people who yearn for fast food across the world. As of 2022, McDonald’s has the sixth-highest global brand valuation.

A recent study discovered that 63% of people look up products and brands on social media before making purchases.

Building a brand without integrating social media marketing into your marketing mix could be detrimental to the success of whatever brand you might be building especially when you are building for digital natives. Theoretically, your business could survive without social media. But could it thrive? My answer would be no. Social media increases the amount of exposure a brand receives and increases traffic. Social media helps to develop loyal fans (a community) and generates leads. Having a strong social media presence allows a brand to develop business partnerships, reduce marketing costs and improve sales. If using social media marketing is not one of the strategies on your marketing strategy, then people may well trust you less because they wouldn’t be able to see the human side of your brand.

McDonald’s is one of the Fortune 500 companies that have integrated social media marketing into the core of their marketing mix and one of the companies that are doing social media marketing the right way. McDonald’s has over ninety-three million followers across five different social media platforms with Facebook taking the larger share of the followers tally. By using audience and social media mapping the right way, the social media handlers of McDonald’s over the years have built an engaged community for the brand online.

Having a strong community of engaged followers online gives your brand a front seat to listen in on your audience’s feedback, thoughts, problems, interests, hobbies, and more. This information is essential to have when it comes to content planning, building target audiences, creating a marketing strategy, and establishing overall business goals.

McDonald’s, like many other companies, utilizes social media platforms as a crucial component of its marketing strategy. The brand seats at the forefront of fast food conversations across the world. Here are five observations on how McDonald’s has used social media marketing to its advantage:

SOCIAL MEDIA MAPPING — A social media map is a graphical representation of where social media conversations and posts are happening using location-based social media apps. Social media discussions are an essential source of information but knowing where the data is coming from is vital. One of the major tasks of every social media handler is to know which social media app to jump on when preparing a social media strategy for marketing purposes.

McDonald’s has carefully selected where the major conversations about fast food happen and the brand has positioned itself at the centre of the conversations. Marketing as proven relies heavily on data. It helps with optimising brand communications based on customer information. The information provides context for data. Knowing the right channel where you can source organic data for your entire marketing activities is key. McDonald’s social media marketing team has carefully mapped out the social media channels that matter to the company’s brand. Marketing on the wrong channel will cost your company time and money, but marketing on the right channel can prove to be the most important glue needed to fix your marketing activities if done the right way. Social mapping is thus an important activity you have to take when planning to integrate social media marketing into your marketing mix.

AUDIENCE MAPPING — An audience map is a document that helps you communicate effectively with your niche. On the surface, it is a marketing tool that helps you know the places this group hangs out, a dictionary of niche-specific jargon, and a map of the topics and ideas they care most about. In-depth research into the activities of McDonald’s across five social media platforms has made me understand that McDonald’s social media handlers have meticulously crafted an audience map for their target audience for each of these platforms. It was done beautifully well and you would probably doubt if the brand on LinkedIn is the same one on Twitter. There is more about audience mapping under content experimentation.

TONE — Tone is a subset of your brand’s voice. Tone adds specific flavour to your voice based on factors like audience, situation, and channel. Essentially, there is one voice for your brand and many tones that refine that voice. Voice is a mission statement, hence the question, what is the mission statement of your brand voice?

Social media is your chance to create a unique message for your niche and help drive your brand in the direction you want. Knowing that LinkedIn is a social network specifically designed for career and business professionals to connect, McDonald’s decided to keep their business on the platform in a professional way. LinkedIn is the only social media platform where McDonald’s observes the basic rules of grammar which include but are not limited to the five key principles of English grammar — word order, punctuation, Tense and aspect, determiners and connectors.

With a well-structured about us and several detailed articles and posts on the platform, it is fair to say that McDonald’s has decided to do away with their rollicking on the platform and observe the rules guiding digital communications in relation to grammar on their LinkedIn platform.

CONTENT EXPERIMENTATION — Experimenting with content is an effective way to capitalize on what’s working and eliminate what isn’t. Brands can diversify their voice through experiments with content types and distribution channels. Content experiments help brands maintain data-driven strategies and make informed decisions.

McDonald’s creates interactive and engaging content to connect with its social media followers. They have run various campaigns, contests, and challenges to encourage user participation, which helps in fostering a sense of community around the brand. Their mascot, Ronald McDonald, was created to appeal to the younger demographics. In other to win the attention of millennials, Gen Z and Gen Alpha, brands must understand that these demographics have different ways of thinking and understanding. You don’t market at them, you market with them. Brands must learn how to be personal, authentic and funny when connecting with these demographics.

According to Jenny Li Fooler, ‘’Learn your audience’s sense of humour and love language and use them in your social posts.

Brands must use humour, but they also need to make sure that what they think is funny is also funny to their target audience. What works on LinkedIn may not work on Twitter and what works on Twitter may not work on Instagram. Knowing how and when to experiment with content is key to brand growth on social media platforms.

By not following the rules guiding grammatical structure when preparing content for Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, McDonald’s has shown us that they are not scared of experimenting with different content across different social media platforms. The restaurant’s social media handlers know that the way people want to be approached on these platforms is different. For example, I use LinkedIn to connect with professionals like myself, catch up with one or two articles about my field, use Twitter to stay updated with the news happening around me, get to know more about the latest transfer in the premier league and jump on whatever bant that is currently trending on the space, I use Instagram because I want to watch reels and see visuals of things I am genuinely interested in. I find it weird seeing GIFs and memes on LinkedIn, they belong to Twitter or Reddit.

By using memes, GIFs and half-baked sentences on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, McDonald’s has been able to connect with a segment of their audience with an attention span of fewer than ten seconds. Is it working? Yes! The posts are relevant to their audience, engagement keeps increasing and more conversations about the brand keeps happening organically.

HUMANIZATION — When brands behave more like humans, in a more nuanced way, with appropriate intent, demonstration of value, relevance, good timing and emotion, they develop stronger bonds with customers. When living at a time when brands and people are more connected than ever and all having fun in the same place: social media. Brands would be wise to take advantage of this opportunity to not only increase their number of followers but also spread brand awareness and positive word of mouth.

From collaborating with social media influencers and celebrities to promote its products to encourage customers to share their experiences and photos on social media platforms using specific hashtags, McDonald’s social media handlers have mastered the art of not posting like marketers. McDonald’s has demonstrated an ability to tap into current trends and memes on social media, aligning its content with popular culture. By doing so, they can make their brand more relatable and appealing to younger demographics.

Being human on social media means adopting a more relatable and personable communication style when interacting with customers instead of standard business jargon. Think of it as cultivating your brand’s personality and values through establishing meaningful connections with your audience. McDonald’s has learnt how to avoid being seen as too robotic, staid or functional on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Human, as a tonal element, means friendly, casual, or irreverent. It’s a way of writing and talking that sounds natural or conversational. This is a characteristic McDonald’s has inhabited and successfully deployed to their own success online.

It’s important to note that social media strategies and trends evolve rapidly, and McDonald’s has implemented new approaches and adapted its social media practices to meet the demands of the present age.

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Published with permission from Caleb Bresh (Corporate communication lead for CCHUB). To read the original post, click HERE

To read more posts by Caleb, click HERE