Dennis YuLike the age-old argument of where to get the best pizza, fried chicken is locked in an eternal debate of who has the best seasoning, spices. Crispy or extra crispy. Mashed potatoes or coleslaw (the answer is BOTH)?.
Two-years in social media can seem like an eternity. Facebook itself has undergone many changes in design, ad distribution, search algorithms, and is now even a publicly traded company. In 2011, BlitzMetrics compiled an audit for Church’s Chicken, comparing their social presence to competitors.
Church’s had a mere 8,397 fans in early 2011 compared to the millions of fans that competitors have acquired.
As of August 9th 2013, Church’s has ballooned to 57,471 fans, a 584% increase since 2011. To put in perspective, KFC has had a 97.4% growth while Popeye’s has grown 104.7%. Not too shabby, Church’s!
As we all know, with great fan growth comes great responsibility (of keeping your fans engaged!). In our original analysis, Church’s absolutely killed in fan engagement with 7.47% of fans being engaged, compared to less than half a percent of some of the bigger guys.
Let’s see how they’re doing today:
It’s notoriously difficult to maintain a high engagement rate as your fans grow, but Church’s beats the average among fast food competitors with 1.33%. Let’s use Subway, whom has over 23MM Facebook fans and a slightly higher engagement rate to compare content:
Subway hits all of the points in their posts. They show off appetizing sandwiches, post deals, and ask questions to their fans to really drive that engagement. How about Church’s Chicken?
Church’s just recently started enforcing the cardinal rule of restaurant advertising – showing the product. The majority of posts before June were short of an eye-sore, blocks of unappealing text that were very easy to skip over in the newsfeed.
Church’s is also running a contest paired with Coca Cola to win a trip to the AMA’s. An awesome contest, if I say so myself. Church’s should be running promoted post ads for this contest, as well as ads showing off their product.
To put in perspective the potential page performance, here is a graph BlitzMetrics put together for a long-standing client of ours regarding their page performance.
This client spends $5,000 per campaign, and over 5 campaigns has acquired over 600,000 fans from just ads alone
I can spend all day talking about fried chicken (and I have!), but there are other areas in the sea of social content that need some love.
This article was written for Business 2 Community by Dennis Yu.
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The increases in FB followers is novel and trendy. However, exactly how do these numbers translate with respect to same store sales increases or trailing 12 month numbers for Church’s ? Or new unit openings ?
DT– exactly! Church’s needs to tie fans with email addresses to measure direct lift. But better, they can run campaigns in some markets and randomly not in others– measuring lift. It’s the same split testing you’d do with any offline media, except this is digital word of mouth.