Differentiation

Chick-Fil-A vs. Wendy’s the Battle of the Fast Food Social Media

Two companies I think that showcase great strengths while utilizing social media, are Wendy’s and Chick-Fil-A—yes there is a bit of a theme for me this week. Both companies are popular and successful fast food industry companies, both focused on providing consumers with top-notch service and top-notch food. While both companies were thriving before the digital age and without social media both are excelling and winning at social media in their own ways. Honestly, the only thing that they have in common in their social media efforts is that they both have strategies and they are effective and working to each company’s benefit. However, their strategies are completely different. Let’s look at both, to see how each company is utilizing social media and succeeding.

Chick-Fil-A Instagram and Twitter

Chick-Fil-A uses Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to reach their customers. The company is customer-centric and wants to ensure that the customer’s experience matches the great taste of the food. Chick-Fil-A honestly doesn’t use any fancy strategy or plan to respond to their customers feedback, they are just present and ready to listen on their social media accounts. In fact, in 2016 “Chick-fil-A was quickening its pulse in social, using a mix of data mining and loose rules of engagement to respond to 35,000 social media mentions a month and create content in under two or three minutes in most cases (Pathak, 2016).” According to Shareen Pathak, Chick-fil-A had only seen an increase of 10 percent of the production of content, but one can contest that the quality of this content has probably gotten a lot better not to mention how quickly they respond to their consumers on social media (2016). Another thing to pay attention to is that Chick-Fil-A takes a different approach on each social media platform, in order to cater to their different target audiences—being that different consumers frequent different platforms. For instance, on Facebook, most of their audience are moms, so they focus their content on recipes. On Instagram, they are trying to reach out to their younger crowd, and generally post enticing pictures of food, but they strive to add a human element. The photos are taken on iPhones and they don’t do any retouching to give it that authentic vibe.

Wendy’s Twitter

Now, Chick-Fil-A has a more traditional strategy for utilizing social media, more wholesome and appeals to families. Wendy’s utilizes social media in a completely different way, their style is a little more rough around the edges. It’s almost as if one college interns got their hands on the Twitter account and struck gold. Wendy’s like to create content that still makes them seem human and relatable, but they have a social media presence that is funny, and probably more relatable for millennials and the younger generations. In 2017, Wendy’s had a phenomenal year for their Twitter account, first, it started with hilarious disses, which included disses at competitor McDonald’s (Check out a list of these epic disses, now). Not too long after this, they made Twitter history with #NuggsForCarter, where high school aged Twitter user Carter Wilkerson tweeted at the company, “How many retweets for a year of free nuggs?” Wendy’s replied 18 million. This set a new record for the most retweeted post, surpassing the infamous Ellen DeGeneres Oscar’s selfie (Ward, 2017) 

References

Patheek, S. (2016, January 10). Chick-fil-A uses data to respond to 35,000 social media mentions a month. Retrieved January 11, 2018, from https://digiday.com/marketing/chick-fil-uses-data-respond-35k-social-media-mentions-month/

Ward, T. (2017, May 13). Nuggs And Sass: Inside Wendy’s Social Media Secret Sauce. Retrieved May 12, 2018, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomward/2017/05/09/nuggs-and-sass-inside-wendys-social-media-secret-sauce/#5dedfa492828