I've got to stop sneaking Entrepreneur Magazine from the gym and just subscribe! There's a great article about how the top 10 franchises including McDonald's are using Twitter.
I'm always trying to drive home how much we still tend to overvalue traditional media and undervalue new media. Since it's free we think it's worthless? Or because it's trendy it can't be effective?
There's something to be said about jumping in and testing testing it out. That's what McDonald's did. They started with their Monopoly promotion. Then they found this astonishing fact:
Someone mentions McDonald's every 10-20 seconds on Twitter.
and then they declared
We get more consumer impressions through Tweeting than through traditional media!
That's the story! Not that they are on Twitter or how they are using it. It's that Twitter is more effective than traditional media at reaching their customers. What is Twitter costing them compared to those big full color ads. At the time of writing they had almost 5,000 followers – I have over 7,000 followers and that's more than just about everyone in the article (they are newbies). Now McDonald's has almost 10k.
Entrepreneur Magazine also talks about Dunkin Donuts. Their approach to Twitter? It's basically a channel for their fans to gush about their brand [marketer's dream – the fans are creating the content and it's a lot of raving. What's more amazing is that over 40k people are listening to it.
So if you're still thinking Twitter is a waste of time or you don't get it, maybe it's worth another look.
Well that sucks that they keep up with the times… when is McDonalds going to go away? đŸ˜›