Wendy’s Will Make You Feel the Burn and We’re Not Talking #SpicyChicken

I have had the pleasure of browsing my peers’ blogs for week 4 and I have not seen anyone discuss Wendy’s and their Twitter page, so I am excited to discuss the fast-food company and their approach to social media marketing. I believe they have been one of the best brands to follow on Twitter for the last several years for 3 key reasons. Their social media content is so effective because it is entertaining, engaging, and demonstrates their personality incredibly well.

1. Wendy’s content is entertaining. Their Twitter platform references pop culture, sports championships (March Madness of which Wendy’s is the official breakfast sponsor), “roasting” their competition as well as trolling their followers from time to time when they take jabs at the fast-food company. Call it a healthy love/hate relationship. It is not uncommon to see Twitter accounts tweet to Wendy’s egging them on by insulting their food or praising their competition and then for Wendy’s to respond as such:

2. Wendy’s content is engaging. Having millions of followers might seem like a vanity metric if they did not also have a high engagement rate. As mentioned above, Wendy’s is the official breakfast sponsor of March Madness which means they are tweeting throughout the championship games encouraging their followers to vote for their winning teams and making bets on who will take each game. Look at how many people engaged with one of their polls from earlier this year:

Most famously, Wendy’s positioned one follower to have one of the most retweeted tweets of all time when Twitter user @carterjwm reached out to the fast-food company asking how many retweets he needed for a year’s supply of free chicken nuggets:

The #NuggsForCarter hashtag was created, went viral and was retweeted over 3.4 million times, and gained support from Apple Music, Microsoft, and Ellen DeGeneres. Although falling short of the 18 million retweet target, apparently Wendy’s still awarded him a year’s worth of chicken nuggets.

3. Wendy’s content has personality. Even I am jealous of Wendy’s cheeky humour, quick wit, and consistent tone of voice. They are not constantly posting promotions, ads, or #facts about their company that no one cares about. Instead, they are focused on maintaining a brand voice and a sassy persona to match. There are various blogs that have numerous screenshots of Wendy’s thought-provoking humorous tweets to their followers, and competitors from the last several years. Here is one of my favourite tweets they posted about their competitor, McDonald’s:

Their chief concept and marketing officer at Wendy’s has said the positive buzz does well for business and helped Wendy’s turn traffic from negative to positive buzz. While it is hard to quantify the direct impact of its marketing campaigns, since 2012, Wendy’s has superseded Burger King to become the №3 U.S. fast-food chain, garnering a 4% share of the $247 billion U.S. market last year, according to Euromonitor. McDonald’s, in comparison, had a 14.7% share while Subway, №2, had a 4.6% share. Proof that it pays to have personality.