QSR chains and the
social media landscape

Social media is a great place to be in for brands in 2017. With more people logging in multiple times a day, there’s no better medium to reach the wi-fi enabled. And that’s exactly what brands from the QSR industry in India did. In this report, we take a look at the social media landscape of quick service restaurants and take a deep dive into the performance of 15 brands.

Brands Analyzed: KFC India, Domino’s Pizza India, Cafe Coffee Day India, Pizza Hut India, McDonald’s India, Starbucks India, Dunkin’ Donuts India, Subway India, Taco Bell India, Burger King India, Costa Coffee India, Chili’s West & South India, Chili’s North & East India, Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf India, Papa John’s Pizza India.

Time Period – Jan 01 – Dec 31, 2016

Community

Organic reach is dead and it doesn’t matter how many fans a brand has. However, a steady growth in community size is a healthy sign of brand efforts paying off.

With an audience base of 7.5 million, KFC had the most Fans in India while Chili’s West & South India had the highest growth rate of 66%.

Content, Campaigns, and Strategy

Domino’s India was one of the most prolific publishers of Facebook content. In all of 2016, the brand posted over 1100 times – that’s almost 3 times a day. The brand also received the most Likes, Comments, and Shares on it’s Facebook content. However, in terms of average engagement, Dunkin Donuts did better even though they posted only 200 times in the whole year – less than a fourth of what Domino’s published.

At Unmetric, we can estimate the Reach and Impressions for all Facebook content and also detect when a Facebook Post is sponsored.

Domino’s was the brand to promote the most Posts. Almost 62% of their publicly visible content was Promoted. Among the brands analyzed in this report – brands on average promoted 38% of their content.

This gave Domino’s an estimated Reach of 143 million, the highest among the brands analyzed.

On Twitter and Instagram as well, Domino’s was the brand to publish most content. This put them in the top 5 on both networks in terms of engagement.

Top Posts

In total, the 15 brands put out 5,352 Facebook Posts, 6,465 proactive Tweets, and 2,591 Instagram posts. We used Unmetric’s Engagement Score to pick out a few of the best performing content pieces.

1. McDonald’s

2. KFC

3. Dunkin Donuts

4. Burger King

Tell us which player from Team Bangalore or Team Mumbai is as fiery as the #AngriestWhopper & win VIP passes! *For Mumbai Residents Only

— BurgerKingIndia (@burgerkingindia) 19 April 2016

5. KFC

#Repost @hopshophog with @repostapp ・・・ This drool worthy chicken was delivered by @kfcindia_official at home today. They just added two delicious new offerings to their menu and one of them is this Smoky grilled chicken. Juicy, marinated in a signature smoky sauce and topped with a unique mouthwatering chipotle garlic glaze that will leave you orgasmic! Its Literally finger lickin good!! So moist, spicy and grilled to perfection! . . By far one of their best marinated chicken. Try it to fall in love with it. Just like how I did. My new midnight craving snack! 🍗🍗 . . . #kfc #delhifoodblogger #blogger #instafood #foodporn #eeeeeats #foodblogger #instagood #all_shots #like4like #f52grams #igers #vscocam #food #hopshophog #instadaily #instalike #streetfood #delhifood #foodphotography #hungry #photooftheday #foodtalkindia #nomnom #foodgasm #hopshophog #delicious

A post shared by KFC India (@kfcindia_official) on Nov 24, 2016 at 1:24am PST

Top Campaigns

Social media success isn’t just based on the volume of content and engagement. To evaluate the brands’ efforts better, I took a look at their campaigns.

In all of 2016, Unmetric was able to track over 130 social media campaigns run by these 15 brands. Common themes included offers, festival greetings, and new menu item launches.

Chilli’s India ran a #ChillisForAll campaign between September 30 and October 22. It consisted of 16 Tweets and 14 Facebook Posts.

Q3. It’s time to treat yourself to a refreshing drink. Guess it to try it #ChilisForAll pic.twitter.com/8uxhlDhajI

— Chili’s India (@ChilisIndia) 30 September 2016

Burger King relaunched their classic menu item with #BiggBossWhopperIsBack2016. The campaign ran in the end of October and was made of 10 Tweets and 2 Facebook Posts.

Brace yourselves because the #BiggBossWhopperIsBack.

— BurgerKingIndia (@burgerkingindia) 16 October 2016

Domino’s #DiwaliDawat campaign, though simple, received close to 500,000 Likes and reached over 3.4 million Facebook users.

Strategy

1. Hashtags

Coining the right hashtag is both an art and a science. While we’ve written a lot about that in the past, one of the things we noticed about the most popular hashtags among the brands analyzed is that they all used their own brand name as a hashtag. And so did users.

Given hashtags enable discover and consolidate all topic related content under one umbrella, this seems to be a smart strategy that is working well for these brands.

2. Customer Service

On Twitter, acknowledging and responding to customer queries has become essential. Whether a person has a complaint, or simply has a question, the digital audience expects a prompt response.

In the QSR industry, the majority of brands seem to be following a trend of asking the user to DM the brand so as to take the query off public view and to also individually handle concerns.

3. Timing

Content publishing isn’t simply about creating engaging stories, it’s also about presenting it at the right time. For the QSR industry, brands seemed to find their engagement sweet spot on Mondays between 6 and 9 AM. Sounds like people look forward to a quick and tasty lunch on a Monday morning!

Social media marketing is continuously changing and even brands that have plenty of engagement opportunities are beginning to leverage data to create better content.

Unmetric helps brands like Myntra, GroupM, and Changi Airport do exactly that. Sign up for a demo and we’ll show you how.

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