Data- Driven Social Media Marketing Plan

McDonalds

Maddie Corbitt, Kelly Culbertson, and Nicole Lender

Task 1: Organizational Brief: McDonalds
McDonalds was created by Dick and Maurice McDonald in 1940. Today, there are over

36,500 McDonalds restaurants around the world, employing about 1.5 million workers globally.

The main products this company has are hamburgers, chicken, French fries, soft drinks, milk

shakes, salads, desserts, coffee, breakfast, etc. Their target audience is anyone from families who

enjoy the happy meals to workers needing breakfast on the go. Its competitors are Starbucks,

Chipotle, Wendys, Burger King, etc. This year, their mission statement has been, Our purpose

goes beyond what we sell. Were using our reach to be a positive force. For our Customers. Our

people. Our Communities. Our World (Official Global Corporate Website: McDonalds).

Now comes the leadership team for McDonalds. The leadership team began with Ray

Kroc who had left the legacy that the executives preserve (Official Global Corporate Website:

McDonalds). The team is made up of the President, Ceo, Vice Presidents and Chief Officers.

McDonalds also has a number of different markets and Presidents for each. These markets

include the USA market for McDonalds, High Growth Markets McDonalds, International Lead

Markets, and also Foundational Markets.

McDonalds communication policies stand for open communication. Corporate

employees, franchise employees and customers alike can and should expect the same level of

transparency and integrity with communication from the company. In McDonalds twenty-five

page Standards of Business Conduct, The Promise of the Golden Arches it is discussed

multiple times how electronic communication is involved in everyday life at McDonald's.

Policies specific to social networks and interaction seem to be under lock and key, however in

2011 McDonalds started a new initiative called Engagement with our People. The basic

understanding was to increase communication within McDonalds and allow franchises to feel

like they were a part of the McDonalds corporate community (IBM).

Task 2: Social Media Network Map: McDonalds

McDonalds was once again created by Ray Kroc, and Dick and Maurice McDonald. Ray

Kroc had first officially opened his first restaurant in Des Plaines, Illinois back in 1955.

McDonalds USA is an active participant on social media. The information gathered through

social media helped create a better understanding on the marketing strategies of McDonalds.

Unlike, their Facebook page, McDonalds USA invests much of their time and efforts in

maintaining an active Twitter feed. The McDonalds Twitter posts several updates each day to

entertain their 3.5+ millions of followers. The social team does respond to a handful of users

each day but only to ones that have posted positive comments.

Within our findings, the social network map had 3 main accounts that had the most

outreach. These sites included the McDonalds USA account, McDonalds Japan, and a follower

of McDonalds USA account known by the name of Fkapeachiz. Majority of the tweets that had

shown up in our data were tweets at McDonalds and not McDonalds tweeting out. For the In-

Degree Centrality the order of centrality went from Fkapeachiz having the most in- degree at 58.

Next was McDonalds Japan with 18, and then McDonalds USA also with an in- degree of 18.

Following in- degree data came out- degree centrality on McDonalds. With this data, we had

gathered that the out- degree ranged from 2-7. The highest being an average McDonalds follower

that had little tweets or follows.

After out-degree, came the data behind betweenness centrality. This data had ranged from

a betweenness of 17.- 3306. Within the top 4 accounts, Fkapeachiz came out first with a

betweenness of 3306 and McDonalds USA coming in second with 1379 betweenness centrality.

Followed by another individual's account who followed McDonalds and then McDonalds Japan

coming in fourth. Lastly, was the degree of closeness centrality which was unique data. The data
was unique in which the closeness centrality was a 1 for each individual. Also, the closeness

centrality data had pulled only followers of McDonalds or average tweeters and not the

McDonalds accounts themselves.

Following the degrees of centrality came the keyword analysis on McDonalds.

McDonalds had a few top words that included: McDonalds, RT, Burgers, Sells, and Gourmet.

Following the top keywords was the top word pairs. These word pairs included: Bc and

McDonalds, McDonalds and sells, and Billion and Burgers. Going along with top keywords

came the top hashtags. These included: #McDonalds and #theresitance. With the top words and

hashtags came the following trends found on McDonalds twitter. The first being RT: just bc

McDonalds sells a billion burgers doesnt mean its gourmet. Next, RT: #TheResistance wants

to know why youre still advertising. Another included, RT: When the milkshake machine is

broke at McDonalds. Lastly, RT: WTF THEY PUTTING IN THESE CHICKEN

MCNUGGETS. As one can see, majority of the trends that was pulled from the data was

retweets.

The tone of conversation had varied throughout the data. There was over 150 neutral

tweets, 39 positive, and then 21 negative. These social marketing success was gathered within

less than a 24-hour period. On average, more than 75% of tweets were neutral. Less than 10% of

tweets were negative and more that 15% of tweets were positive. To go into further detail the

most positive tweet was Just bcc McDonalds sells a billion burgers doesnt mean its gourmet.

This tweet alone had over 12,000 retweets and over 30,000 likes. Next was a tweet saying Carl

from McDonalds: NOW SERVING ORDER 806.. 806?? FIVE MCDOUBLES AND THREE

LARGE FRIES. Me: first of all, lower your voice. This tweet had over 500 retweets followed

by over 5,000 likes.

 With social media today, companies such as McDonalds use social media as a way to

advertise their products and to connect with fans. According to an article by social media today,

McDonalds is ranked number one top performing brand across multiple metrics (Walter). These

metrics included: engagement, earned impressions, impressions, active audience, active

participants, and lastly followers, and brand posts (Walter). With each of these individual key

metrics, McDonalds had ranked first in each category. The reason for this being the large

audience that plays such a huge role in their success (Walter). McDonalds uses other tactics

besides their large audience to gain a strong social media presence. These tactics and strategies

include listening to stay on trend, remaining authentic and transparent, personal social

engagement, and quality content (Walter).

Situational Analysis: SWOT: McDonalds

In order to understand McDonalds needs, we ran a SWOT Analysis on them as a

company. For this analysis, we mainly focused on their social media platforms and presence. A

strength that McDonald's has is the ability to target children. This makes it easier to market on

social media because children and young adults are active on all sorts of social media platforms.

Another strength is that McDonalds is a worldwide company, so they can reach so many people

from different areas of the world. They have main McDonalds twitter sites at some of the

biggest countries that have McDonalds. Ex: US, Brazil, Japan. A final strength is that

McDonald's has become a part of culture all over the world, their reach really has no boundaries.

McDonalds has become incorporated into everyday culture and conversation. They truly are a

household name all over the world.

Such a successful company also has its weaknesses. Negative Publicity is a very large

weakness most cases where McDonalds is involved in or talked about is negative. Also,
McDonalds main US account is not responding to negative tweets or events that involve their

name. Ex: People tweeted at McDonalds about them having a commercial on Fox during the

Sean Hannity show after he had been accused of sexual assault. Finally, McDonalds is often the

butt end of jokes, many jokes are made on a daily basis at McDonalds expense. These jokes are

about their ice cream machine that always seems to be broken, how unhealthy the food is or the

workplace environment.

McDonalds has several opportunities to help combat these threats. McDonalds has a

great opportunity to reach such a broad audience. Their followers are from many different places

and backgrounds, so they do have an advantage when they advertise on social media. They could

use the Ronald McDonald House Charity as a form of interaction and audience reach that would

not only benefit the charity but also McDonalds Restaurants as a whole. They have the

opportunity to tweet about uber eats because that has been a big upgrade for their company to

partner with uber. Finally, they could combat negative feedback by using Twitter to interact

with their customers and actually try and fix the issue.

Finally, McDonalds does face several threats. There is competition on social media

between other fast food accounts. These competitions are taking the opportunity to tweet at

McDonalds putting them on blast. For example, Wendys (See Figure 1 and 2).
(Figure 1) (Figure 2)

A threat that has more social media presence is Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts. More marketing

for those two companies about their coffee could hurt McDonalds customers from coming in to

get coffee. Finally, other food chains are healthier (Subway etc.). Especially with Millennials

healthier lifestyles are becoming increasingly popular which means McDonalds is no longer the

go to lunch spot for the upcoming generations.

Content Marketing Plan:

After analyzing the company's social media presence, we have come up with several

goals, objectives and tactics for McDonalds to increase their overall success as a company.

The first goal would be to raise awareness of Ronald McDonald House Charity. Currently

there is not much marketing for the charity as a whole and it makes up a huge part of

McDonald's identity. According to Ronald McDonalds About Us page on the charity's website,

they say McDonalds support extends from monetary contributions and volunteerism, to cause

related marketing promotions... McDonalds has helped RMHC positively impact millions of
children and their families, and continues to provide valuable resources and support to help us

expand our core programs and services. Next would be to increase the donations that are given

to the charity. This can be done through a number of ways, but one in particular would be a

marketing plan based around the holidays. This would include the fixing of both the milkshake

machines and the advertising done on Ronald McDonald House Charity.

Using the Ronald McDonald House Charity as a base for the marketing plan. As a social

team, we would like to use the charity in order to gain more interaction on social media. This

would not only gain more positive publicity but positive advertising. The ultimate goal would be

to increase the interaction between McDonald's and their customers and followers. Currently

McDonald's lacks when it comes to interaction on social media. A majority of the light

McDonalds is caught in, is a negative light. This marketing plan is to change that and put

McDonald's in a positive light.

One objective would be to raise awareness for the Ronald Mcdonald House Charity by

offering a promotion that all ice cream sales during a specific time period would go towards the

Ronald McDonald house.

Another objective would be to decrease the negative feedback about the broken ice cream

machines. It has become an ongoing joke about the ice cream at McDonalds because usually the

ice cream machines are broken, so the company will have to either take the time to fix each one

or buy new ice cream machines for each company that has one that malfunctions. Once this is

accomplished, they should tweet that the holidays have come early and the ice cream machines

are fixed. They also need to train all the employees how to fix these machines as well.
 The next objective to gain more interaction on social media would be to tell people to

retweet the tweets if they are excited about the ice cream. I think that they'll end up with many

retweets, maybe even from popular people, because of the fact that all of the proceeds will go

toward the Ronald McDonalds house.

To increase donations, McDonalds will really have to push this occurrence a lot on

twitter. Their marketing team could create photos and videos to help promote this because it

should be very important to the fact that the Ronald McDonalds House will be benefiting from

this.

To gain more positive publicity and advertising, McDonalds needs tweet about this

event consistently throughout the weeks prior to the weekend. They also need to have some of

their top promoters to do a good job with their tweets as well as the photos and videos they are

using. These tweets cannot be bland, but rather exciting and touching to those who love ice

cream as well as helping with the Ronald Mcdonald House. If they do this, then other big twitter

pages could start to retweet this and they will then get more positive publicity and advertising.

The target audience would go as young as 13 to as old as around 60 years old. We chose

13 because that is the youngest age that anyone can be on twitter and they tend to really enjoy ice

cream. The age goes into 20 and above because maybe they might not be as active on twitter, but

they could definitely see viral tweets and they are around the adult age. It would be important

especially if they have children to take them to get ice cream so that the proceeds could go to the

Ronald Mcdonald House over that weekend.

Approximately one week before these new ice cream machines are debuted, a single

image will be posted on every social media platform. It will feature the Ronald McDonalds logo
but instead of Ronald and a child holding hands, together they will be holding a milkshake. The

caption will read The Holidays came earlier, join us in making the holidays come early for a

child in need and there will be a date at the bottom. Two days later there will be another post

announcing that all ice cream machines will be temporarily closed down (if they were actually

working). And again, a date (the same date) will be at the bottom. Finally, a twitter blast will

occur where there will be a final announcement. Starting on that (previously posted) date all US

McDonalds will debut either new or newly fixed ice cream machines, and starting on the day of

their debut all ice cream sales (cones, milkshakes, McFlurries, etc) will go towards the Ronald

McDonald house from 12pm-5pm for five consecutive days. They will also advertise that there

will be an opportunity to Round up for Charity all week long. The charity of course will be the

Ronald McDonald House.

The overall key messages for the marketing plan would be to create public awareness and

to learn about Ronald McDonald House Charity. The message that would be captured between

the charity and McDonalds is that the Holidays Came Early this year at McDonalds. Lastly, we

want McDonalds to be able to overcome the negative and bring out more positive. Also, to

increase their role on social media and interaction. To show customers and followers that

McDonalds is listening.
 References

IBM: IBM. IBM Helps McDonalds Serve Up Social Collaboration To Transform Workforce

(2013). Retrieved from https://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/40271.wss

McDonalds Official Global Corporate Website: McDonalds. (2017). Retrieved from

http://corporate.mcdonalds.com/mcd.html

McDonalds Official Global Corporate Website: McDonalds. (2017). Retrieved from

https://www.mcdonalds.com/dam/AboutMcDonalds/Investors/9497_SBC_International_

EN-US%20v2%20final%20061311.pdf

Ronald McDonald House Charity. Our Relationship with McDonalds.

https://www.rmhc.org/our-relationship-with-mcdonalds

Walter, E. (2014, November 25). How McDonald's Wins in Social: Ranking at Number One.

Retrieved November 27, 2017, from

https://www.socialmediatoday.com/content/how-mcdonalds-wins-social-ranking-

number-one