CHENNAI – Quick Service Restaurants in India have been quick to adapt to social media. They”ve tried their hand at cracking the social recipe to success and the metrics say they’re quite close to cracking the code. While many international chains have set shop across the country, the Indian bred chains have fought bravely to catch up with them.
Facebook sets the scene as most brands discover their comfort zone in this network and only few brands have dared to test the waters of Twitter and other social networks.
Unmetric, the company that asks brands if they are social enough, explores the social media activities of 15 QSR chains on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Pinterest while pulling out unique insights that dissect and bring to light the social strategy of each brand.
These chains have been chosen based on their Facebook Unmetric score, the first ever benchmarkable score which takes into account various quantitative and qualitative metrics to rank a brand against its competitors. While all 15 brands are active on Facebook, only 10 are active on Twitter, 5 on YouTube and 2 on Pinterest. Dominos and Café Coffee Day are the only brands with activity on all four social networks.
Of all the brands analyzed, KFC stands out. Not only do they have a large fan base of 4.82 million fans on Facebook, but also the most subscribers on YouTube and a strong follower base on Twitter.
Though this gives them quite an edge, this is only the tip of the iceberg. Even though Dominos is ahead in terms of fan numbers (with 4.88 million fans), KFC takes the lead in terms of growth. Growing at a rate of 16%, they added over 800,000 new fans in the last two months. Cocoberry is the only brand to have lost followers in the time period and had a negative growth of 0.1 percent.
KFC also found the content sweet spot and their regular updates engage very well with their fans. Unmetric’s engagement score uses an algorithm based on the number of Likes, Comments, Shares and Estimated Impressions to produce a benchmarkable score to rate fan engagement.
They’ve received the highest average engagement of 110 from 208 admin posts. This is a little less than three times the sector average of 44. 8 of the top 10 most engaging posts come from KFC. While Dominos updated their page 383 times (the highest), Subway updated it the least with only 22 posts.
Apart from engaging a fan, a truly “social” brand also replies to fan posts. Once again KFC stands out. They’ve received the highest number of posts from fans (over 2,000) and their answers averagely come within 418 minutes.
However, they answered only 23% of fan posts. McDonald’s and Cocoberry are the only two brands that do not allow fans to post on their wall.
Five of these 15 do not have an official Twitter handle for India. They are Baskin Robbins, Subway, Dunkin’ Donuts, McDonalds and Costa Coffee.
On Twitter, Mad Over Donuts stands tall with an Unmetric score of 32. Dominos is not far behind with a score of 30. KFC on the other hand, which was the king of Facebook, takes the back seat when it comes to Twitter.
Dominos and Café Coffee Day have the most followers, 20,844 and 12,998 respectively. Starbucks, on the other hand, was the one to grow the most with a growth rate of 29%. Taco Bell comes in second with a growth rate of 19.6%. Both seem to be growing well over the sector average of 11.2%.
M.O.D sends 24 tweets a day. They reply to fan posts all within 330 minutes and have made the highest number of replies when compared to the all other brands. This is impressive as the average QSR brand took 877 minutes to reply.
On the other side of the road, Cocoberry, Pizza Hut and Barista do not reply to follower mentions and shut the two way street which is the epitome of the social network itself.
The only brands with official YouTube channels are KFC, Dominos, Pizza Hut, CCD and McDonalds.
Of these, KFC once again floats to the top with the most views, subscribers and a robust video base. KFC has 902 followers and also grew at a rate of 10%. This is lower than the growth rate (14.4%) of an average brand from the sector.
