McDonald's Use of Social Media and Traditional Media

Introduction to McDonald's

McDonald's is the world's largest fast food chain serving more than 47 million customers daily. As one of the most successful brands globally, the company mainly targets children, youths, young adults and the young urban families. McDonald's positions themselves as a family friendly, kid and youth-oriented fast food restaurant offering delicious meals at low price.

Two Different Media's Positioning, Consistency and Interaction:

McDonald's traditional media, TV commercials, clearly indicate their positioning. Most of the commercials feature on how children desire McDonald's, how a family have a pleasant time in a McDonald's restaurant, or how excited and content some youths and young adults feel for McDonald's food. However, on McDonald's social media, Facebook, the positioning is slightly different. It mainly targets on youths and young adults with interesting topics, entertaining commercials, polls and promotions. A post that focuses on children and young families is rare on McDonald's Facebook. Frankly, the interaction between McDonald's TV commercial and Facebook is weak. The interaction between the two media types is merely one way. McDonald's upload their TV commercials to Facebook, their TV commercials, by contrast, never mentioned about their Facebook page.

Insights into the Effectiveness of Media

In terms of consistency in positioning, the combination of TV commercials and social media is effective in increasing profits. TV commercials send out messages and promotions that get their targeted group's attention; meanwhile, the same TV commercials are uploaded to Facebook to keep the same segment interested and allow them to provide feedback. Moreover, McDonald's perform interactive marketing by making polls and eliciting responses from the customers, which enable McDonald's to collect quantitative and qualitative data for analysis. McDonald's then focus on the right priorities to better fulfill the customers' needs and as a result, they are able to build a strong relationship with the Facebook followers. When McDonald's post a new message on Facebook, these loyal customers may inform others and thus, the business gets promoted and expands.

One recommendation to McDonald's is that they should enhance the interaction by making references to their Facebook page at the end of TV commercials in order to attract more customers to visit their Facebook page.

Measurements of Effectiveness:

Even though it is unlikely to measure effectiveness by tracing the direct financial return on McDonald's investment in Facebook, we can still measure the effectiveness in two other different ways.