McDonald’s ambition for 2020 was not only to rethink how the company and fans think about social, but also we act and speak on social as well. We set out to speak to true fans of the brand and have our community manager be the ultimate super fan and brand champion. If we nailed that, everything intrinsic like follower count, engagement, etc. would take care of itself.

Every execution was based on a well-known fan truth. That’s what makes it resonate with the audience - no matter where you live, you know those McDonald’s truths and connect with them.

From there, we connect our truth to whatever is top of mind: moments from the internet, everyday culture, iconic McDonald’s menu items, and more. For example: Having one of the most famous menus in all of the world is hard. How can you expect the customer to just choose? Every real McDonalds fan knows you just can’t make a decision like that so easily. We wanted to share that exact moment of indecisions that all fans have experienced out loud together. Can i get uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh? Oh also, do you know what the monolith resembles? A McDonald’s drive thru intercom. So Let’s make it a drive thru intercom. And so much more.

The beauty of McDonald’s twitter is that it is personable, relatable and coming from the voice of a super fan. So when the community manager speaks, it is representative of all McDonald's fans. One thing that super fans know is once you get to the register or drive-thru you become indecisive. Our social strategy is to tap into the many fan truths that make McDonald’s unique. Some of these truths include:

- McDonald’s has a wide range of menu items that no longer appear. These are items that superfans still want today, so much so they ask the community manager for them to return daily.

- Getting a Happy Meal as a kid is a universally beloved experience. But at some point everyone graduates from kid’s meals to an adult order.

- When people go through our drive-thru, they can become indecisive.

Consistent, relatable tweets and engagement with our audience on Twitter.

Examples of specific tweets:

- We chose to start the tweet with how everyone begins to place their order at a McDonald's: “can I get…” From there we dialed up the indecisiveness with extending the “h” on uhh for the full character limit allotted. Thus prompting anyone who reads this to say it out loud or to themselves at the same time.

- We saw visual similarities between the monolith and our drive thru speaker. So, we decided to photoshop the image people were seeing everywhere into just that.

Since the beginning of this McDonalds social renaissance we have been able to garner 158.4k new followers, 3.6M total engagements along with 182M earned total impressions.

We also garnered press and cross channel promotion on specific tweets:

https://www.today.com/food/viral-mcdonald-s-tweet-making-people-surprisingly-sad-t201208

https://www.foxnews.com/food-drink/mcdonalds-tweet-happy-meals-concern-do-you-need-help

https://www.reddit.com/r/im14andthisisdeep/comments/k07o61/mcdonalds_being_deep/

Another example: The tweet of the McDonald’s monolith had the most engagement for the month of December and 4th overall of the year. Resulting in 9,503 retweets, 2,067 quote tweets and 103.6k likes. Not to mention, taking on a life of its own by showing up on meme accounts and cultural websites like Hypebeast.