McDonald's Vs. Burger King on Twitter

by QIAN XU

McDonald’s has a whopping 3.5 million followers on Twitter and is communicating with them regularly, with 393,412 tweets to-date. For a major brand with a young customer demographic, Burger King has a relevantly low social following, with only 1.57 million followers and 19,741 tweets on Twitter.

Compare the numbers

·         Burger King was a latter entrant, joining Twitter in July 2010 compare to McDonald's September 2009. But with only 1 year later, McDonald's has sent over 20 times the number of Tweets Burger King has sent.

·         McDonald's has a more visual timeline as compared to Burger King, having tweeted out7,109 photos and videos to Burger King’s 2,212.

·         But with every aspect exceed Burger King, McDonald's receive  a half number "like" compare to Burger King.

·         Both of them tweet at irregular intervals — sometimes once a day, at most four times a day.

Compare strength

·         Both brands have custom headers and profile pictures

·         McDonald's has special account for customer service and it can be found on its bio, shows that it interact with customers quickly and effectively. McDonald’s not only posts on its Twitter feed, but actually replies to its followers as well, again opening the door for two-way conversation.

·         Burger King does engage with some of its tweeters, @ replying to some with promotional discounts. But the ideas of engagement and authenticity don’t come across on its Twitter page.

·         Both of their content are popular for the promotion, coupon, campign, discount.

Social Media 50/50 Rule

·         Both of them has applied 50/50 Rule, they are promoting their brands by attractive visual effect (graphic design) and interesting content.

·         McDonald's has more interesting content and it simply tweets more to show more content to attract retweet, repost, share videos.

Compare their most successful tweet

  

Winner: McDonald’s

Compared by the amount of comments, retweet, like, McDonald’s is significantly higher than Burger King. As Burger King is latter comer, and it engage and invest less consider their twitter strategy. So its entire popularity on twitter is less than McDonald’s.

For McDonald’s, the tweet is about a new products- new flavor. As McDonald’s always wins on its 4Ps, its new products are highly anticipated and even it tweet a messager not picture of products, people are paying close attention to it.

For Burger King, the tweet shows its products feature, that is fried. And its content are also very interesting as it can be seen that in the comments zone, fans use the same “fomula” to write their reply. So as a good content that draw much of attention, it is their most sucessful tweet.