Social Listening

Wendys on Social Media 

    For my blog post on Social Media marketing I chose to talk about how Wendys is approaching the advertising game on social media. Wendys has got to be the most interesting company on social media at the moment because they choose to interact with customers in funny, sometimes rude ways to get themselves trending and in result more people seeing their brand. They will attack other companies often times "roasting" them on their food getting other twitter users to retweet because they find it funny and want that content on their page. This is really interesting to me because from what ive seen this is a very fresh take on social media marketing as most companies advertise with photos or new products Wendys chooses to be funny.

Wendys value proposition is "Quality is our recipe" which doesn't really align with how they portray themselves on social media but not all their content on twitter are roasts and jokes. Looking through there page on twitter I find that they do address complaints directed at the company and help out twitter users that have a bad experiences at their franchises. I think this is a smart move by Wendys because you need more than just jokes for every audience to like your brand. I think that the comedy attracts the younger audience to spread their brand while the customer service aligns with older customers who want more out of quality food experience rather than jokes on social media. All over the internet in almost every platform ive found screenshots from Wendys tweets of people usually commenting "funniest fast food franchise" or "Wendys a savage for this" which for the most part is very positive. I think that Wendys is smart in this sense because its subliminal marketing as more people retweet and repost more and more potential customers are shown what Wendys is all about. The challenge here is to keep all different kinds of customers they can't be completely light hearted on social media and need to keep the posts somewhat helpful for customers that are looking for deals, help, or new menu items. I think they do a great job though because just in talking to my friends what it seems like is everyone I know is aware of Wendys marketing presence online.

Wendys does respond to most customers especially on twitter. From what I found they tend to respond to complaints about food or service by asking where the franchise location is and providing a coupon or free meal in the customers direct messages. This is a great move by Wendys marketing as one burger from Wendys is quite cheap to them but if a customer is treated well they may continue to come back more and more which will give Wendys a much larger sum of money for their company. Not only for that customer but this customer might tell his friends how Wendys treated him well and let people know that they are a good company which would give Wendys more and more customers. I think that if I was brand manager for this company I would follow the comedic route they are taking because it does attract a lot of customers but also maybe play giveaway games with the twitter fanbase. A lot of famous users do this to keep people interacting with their posts and it really works as the idea that just retweeting will get you something like "free frosty for life" will get thousands maybe millions of clicks. Doing this I feel would help boost Wendys marketing tremendously even though it is doing very well without that help right now.