After winning Twitter’s Best Brand Presence in 2021, we knew that our strategy to spotlight every McDonald’s fan was working. It was important that we keep our foot on the gas while setting our sights on the future. The objective was to grow our follower base by diversifying the internet spaces where @mcdonalds shows up.

Our north star is to talk fan-to-fan about the many small truths that give this huge brand a unique place in American life. We’ve successfully been able to do this by treating our Community Manager as a superfan who is lucky enough to run the McDonald’s account. This is the through line for all of work.

All our social work aims to equip our community with tools that grow their fandom, recruit new fans, and champion the brand in untapped arenas. We’ve outlined key ingredients that can help inform and guide the work that we call the ‘Creative Trifecta’. First we ensure the idea is rooted in a brand/ product fan truth. Then we search for the appropriate trending format that will best bring this to life. Lastly, we consider which social platform the creative idea will be most successful on.

When we saw an increased interest in gaming amongst our followers, we began tailoring some of our organic content towards this. We created a custom @xbox controller for stealing fries, a readerboard announcing the @destinythegame release, and custom artwork for fans of @finalfantasyvii.

We dove head first into the crypto space by tweeting our concern for crypto social media managers during the Bitcoin downturn. The next day Elon Musk urged us via Twitter to accept Dogecoin, and we cleverly responded urging Tesla to accept our made up currency “Grimacecoin”.

While venturing into new territory, we continued to insert McDonald’s into everyday topical moments that our fans would appreciate. When Instagram was down, we poked fun at our famously fickle ice cream machines. And when it became extremely difficult to snag Taylor Swift tickets, we made the joke that the discontinued snack wrap was easier to get your hands on.

We hit our main goal of increasing our overall follower growth with a 364,000 gain in 2022. We reached a staggering 3.3 million engagements with over 117 million reach across all social channels.