25 Jun McDonald’s: Facebook Fan Page Example #15
Continuing with the Facebook Fan Page Examples series, we arrive at McDonald’s, a page with over 20 million fans. Around for 57 years, McDonald’s has revolutionized the fast food industry, but is it as trailblazing in social media marketing? Let’s drive-thru to the second window and examine this super-sized fan page first-hand.
Landing Tab: McDonald’s Wall
At first glance, McDonald’s Wall is fairly engaged. The brand updates their cover photo monthly to reflect seasonal nostalgia and new offerings, as well as regularly posting clever quips around menu items paired with a photo. The wall is turned off to visitor posts, so only comments and likes on existing posts are allowed. Given the 20 million fans on the page it is probably a wise strategy to turn off the wall in order to keep fan conversation on target; however, the posts rarely include a call-to-action for fans, so the comments lead to off-topic conversations anyhow. In terms of utilizing Timeline, McDonald’s does a great job of embracing the feature by adding in key milestones as well as highlighting and pinning posts when appropriate.
McDonald’s Quality Tab
McDonald’s has frequently come under fire for serving highly processed and unhealthy food. So it’s no surprise to see a Quality Tab showcasing the authenticity of its products and where they come on the page to combat that image. The tab focused on video vignettes highlighting three McDonald’s suppliers–a potato farmer, lettuce grower and a cattle rancher. The videos are done extremely well. They are engaging, heart-felt and the perfect length to live in social media. However, for as great as the videos are, it would have been nice to see the tab have a little more substance. The tab simply re-purposes the creative found on the McDonalds.com website, not allowing fans to intuitively like or share the videos or click through to get more information. Restructuring this tab to exclude the upper navigation in a favor of a video carousel along with social sharing would greatly improve the user experience.
McDonald’s What’s New Tab
Found in the second row of tab icons, the What’s New Tab focuses on the healthier items offered on the McDonald’s menu. The tab feels a little disjointed and not what you might typically expect when you’re looking for current events and promotions. McDonald’s has so many fabulous web resources such a newsroom, trends & innovation, community programs and sustainability values. With all these assets, even an evergreen tab acting as a navigation hub so fans can access all this information would be a wiser use of space then the current page.
McDonald’s Local Tab
By far my favorite Facebook tab live currently is the McDonald’s Local Tab. Upon landing on the tab, you are prompted to provide your zipcode to get updates and personalized messages from your city. Once entered, you land on your city page including polls, community events, grand openings/re-openings from local operators, and a feed of posts from your regional Facebook page. While some of the feeds are a little dated (the community events hadn’t been updated for the region I was checking since 2011) the concept of personalized, updated content with share and like functionality is a homerun for McDonald’s.
McDonald’s Fan Engagement
As I stated earlier, McDonald’s disables their Wall to fan posts and only allows interaction on its own updates. The highest engagement on the wall includes posts with photos of favorite McDonald’s food, such as Chicken McNuggets and assorted desserts. Fan prompted posts such as ‘fill-in-the-blank’ also proved to encourage more quality engagement among fans. Despite the measures taken to disable the Wall, McDonald’s posts receive a lot of spam and negative comments. Most of the negative comments refer back to McDonald’s unhealthy fast food image. The one surprising thing I noticed though, was that McDonald’s does not actively respond to fans in the comments. While this is difficult given the sheer volume of conversation on the page, I would like to see McDonald’s engage more with consumers through fan responses as well as fostering a 2-way positive dialogue with clear calls to action in their Facebook updates.
In comparison to one of their competitors, Burger King, McDonald’s seems to be on-par with industry engagement rate:
Overall, I believe the McDonald’s fan page has great potential that it hasn’t tapped into yet. Leveraging existing website resources to package in an interactive and meaningful way could bring more value to the Facebook tabs, while beefing up the two-way dialogue with clearer calls to action on the Wall could further engage fans. These are two quick points of consideration that could greatly improve fan engagement for the page.
Are you a fan of the McDonald’s Facebook page? Are you “lovin’ it” or do you have suggestions for improvement? Share in the comments.
