Why don't brands follow their customers on Twitter?

I recently realized that I haven't posted since August.  Not that anyone is distraught with the lack of attention to this blog, but I should keep up with it, right?

I do have an excuse of a couple of weeks of personal vacation, some business travel and working on an article on “Using Social Media as Part of an Effective Brand/Marketing Strategy" for the December 2012 issue of the International Franchise Association's "Franchising World" Magazine.

Oh, and I do have my day job which fortunately has been extremely busy.

Anyway, in doing the research for the Franchising World  piece, and as an extension of my August post here, I thought it would be interesting to not only look at the top Franchise Brands' number of Twitter followers:

Concept	Twitter  Followers
Subway	753,749
McDonalds	717,350
Taco Bell	268,049
Chick-fil-A	198,263
Dunkin	177,346
Buffalo Wild Wings	171,343
Dominos	149,033
Pizza Hut	136,513
Wendys	126,148
KFC	108,176
Jimmy Johns	103,530
GNC	94,249
Arbys	70,557
Burger King	68,740
Chilis	66,272

as of October 14, 2012

But, also having just re-read the terrific "The Tasti D-Lite Way", I thought I'd see how many franchised brands reciprocate and follow their followers.   In the book, Jim Amos and BJ Emerson discuss "Social Anxiety", the need to have more fans or followers than the competition.  This "viral envy" puts focus on quantity vs. "quality of engagement, and reach and impact".  

Throughout the book, the authors reference their strategy to follow their followers (and it shows the list below).

Why not follow your followers as well?

There are probably many reasons:  I'd bet Number One is "not enough resources to actively separate the signal from the noise".   That can be a legitimate reason, but there are lots of tools available to help.

So here's the Top 15 franchised brands, now ranked by the ratio between how many accounts follow them and how many they follow:

Concept	Twitter Followers	Twitter    Following	Ratio
Tasti D-Lite	7,903	7,681	97.2%
Perkins	1,363	1,288	94.5%
Interim Health Care	2,370	2,227	94.0%
Arbys*	70,557	61,805	87.6%
Carl's Jr	28,642	20,485	71.5%
Bojangles	4,622	3,200	69.2%
Hertz	18,593	12,831	69.0%
Home Instead Senior Care	1,026	657	64.0%
Great Clips	5,001	3,117	62.3%
Hardees	15,052	8,312	55.2%
Applebees	37,082	19,870	53.6%
TGI Fridays	17,535	9,247	52.7%
Churchs	8,761	3,917	44.7%
KFC*	108,176	48,302	44.7%

as of October 14, 2012
* in top 15 of total Twitter followers


What do these franchised brands know that most other brands don't?

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The Most "Liked" Franchises on Facebook

Back in April at FranCamp 2012, I spent a fair amount of time beginning the conversation of the advantage Big Brands have over Small Brands on Facebook.

Over the summer,  I took some time to do a down and dirty analysis of Franchised Brands' relative rank in Facebook "Likes" compared to their overall size, based on world-wide sales.  I'm not a researcher so this nothing scientific and you could have done it if you wanted to invest the time.

So since I did invest the time, here are the results of simply looking at the top 100 Franchised Brands from the 2011 Franchise Times report and looking at the number of "likes" they have on Facebook.

Some quick observations that may not be very surprising:

1. Of the Franchise Times Top 100 Franchised Brands, 47 are Food concepts and they completely dominate the top "Liked" Franchised Brands.  
2. 43 of the Top 50 "liked" Franchised Brands on Facebook are all Food.
3. The Top "Liked" Non-Food brand is GNC with nearly 600,000 likes
4. The ONLY other Non-Food brands in the Top 50 "Likes" are Ace Hardware, am/pm, Snap On Tools, Curves and  UPS Stores

Now here's where it got interesting for me.  What's the delta between the brand's rank in the Top 100 (again, based on system-wide world-wide sales) vs. their rank in Facebook "Likes"? 

Note:  I did not include the Lodging and Real Estate Brands in this analysis because, quite frankly, they're a mess.  Most of them have so many different local properties and franchisees with pages that I couldn't come to a simple conclusion on their aggregated "likes" without a ton more time invested (wasted).


Here's my analysis

It's interesting to see the biggest deltas between the Sales rank and the Facebook rank.  These brands are the top ten overachievers:

• Krispy Kreme
• Jimmy Johns
• Five Guys
• Hooters
• Bojangles
• Buffalo Wild Wings
• Zaxby's
• Long John Silvers
• Baskin Robbins
• Steak N Shake 

Those restaurant brands that have opportunity to grow their "likes" based on their sales rank include:

• KFC
• Wendy's
• Burger King
• Tim Horton's

Since I started this blog post back in May and finished it in early August, I have another cut of the data that shows the growth of "Likes" for the top brands.   Generally, the growth per brand was between 5-8%.  Not bad for essentially 90 days.

What stood out was the growth that 5 brands enjoyed:

Chick-fil-A  -- Gained 1.1 million "likes" (+22.6%)

KFC  -- Gained 818,000 "likes" (+35.9%)
iHop --= Gained 581,826 "likes" (+33.3%)
Sonic -- Gained 496,962 "likes" (+33.4%)
Applebees -- Gained 592,000 "likes" (+23.7%)

and relatively small, but Red Robin added 164,985 new "likes", an increase of 44.1%

I wonder if the Chick-fil-A growth was due to its recent "Appreciation Day"?  But what about KFC??  Hasn't their marketing been more active recently?

Once again, here's my analysis including the growth.

All in all, this was an interesting project.  The leader of "Liked" Franchise Brands continues to be McDonald's with over 21 million "likes" followed by Subway with 15.6 million, Taco Bell (nearly 9 million), Buffalo Wild Wings (8.2 million) and Pizza Hut (8.1 million).

How's this compare to other brands?

The Top 5 product brands I was able to find are:

Coca-Cola - 46.5 million
Converse - 32.4 million
Starbucks - 31.2 million
Red Bull - 29.1 million
Oreo - 27.5 million

And to conclude, everyone pales in comparison to Lady Gaga who has over 53 million "likes".

If you would like a copy of the complete research, please email me at todd@toddleiser.com

And if you are working on your CFE (Certified Franchise Executive), we'll be sharing more about this at the ICFE Special Session on Social Media & Franchising, February 17, 2003 at the IFA's 53rd Annual Convention.

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The Intersection of Direct Mail and Social Media

Thanks Engage121 for the opportunity to guest blog today on The Intersection of Direct Mail and Social Media

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