Introduction
Social media public relations campaigns constitute a series of activities planned beforehand to accomplish a specific goal with coordinated marketing efforts to reinforce a business intent or message while relying on one or multiple social media platforms. According to Kim (2016), most social media PR campaigns usually pursue a single business goal on the targeted audience using the selected social media platform. Common social media platform employed include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, WeChat and Snapchat. PR campaigns on social media purpose to drive sales, solicit feedback from users, increase website traffic, improve brand engagement and build email market lists. While selecting a social media platform, corporations do so by considering preferences of different demographics ( Kim, 2016) . To develop an effective marketing communication in PR and advertising on social media, brands create a compelling message through written messages, audio, video or photographs and deliver it to targeted audience in a meticulous style to achieve desired results. The paper presents an elaboration of KFC’s Herbs and Spices social media PR campaign that took place on Twitter.
Discussion
Twitter is a social networking and microblogging site launched in 2006. It has its headquarters in the United States of America. Users who have registered with the platform post and interact with each other via messages termed as “Tweets”. Individuals and corporations post tweets to share their thoughts, news, advertise, run marketing campaigns and share real time information in 280 characters or less (Twitter.com, n.d). Latest 2019 statistics reported that Twitter had an overwhelming 330 million monthly users and 134 users who are active on the site on daily basis. Approximately 63% of Twitter users are aged between 35 and 65 years. Regarding Twitter demographic gender, 34% of twitter users are female with males commanding a staggering 66%. The platform’s users spend an average 3.39 minutes per session. Twitter is an effective tool used by business to business (B2B) as a digital marketing platform. Each day, approximately 500 million tweets are sent equating to 5.787 per second.
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Founded as Kentucky Fried Chicken in 1930 by Harland Sanders, KFC Corporation is a chain of fast foods and restaurants located in Kentucky in the United Stes of America. The food brand specializes in chicken products and has more than 19,500 units, with its presence in 115 countries worldwide (Kfc.com, n.d). KFC ranks as number one chicken brand in terms of popularity. Some of its product line include sandwiches, chicken, salads, chicken pieces, and wraps. The fast food chain focuses more on fried chicken but also sells grilled and roasted chicken dishes and desserts. Additional products prepared and sold by KFC include pork and beef based products. KFC serves approximately 12 million customers most of them making take out or to go purchases. The fast food chain utilizes social media in engaging customers and attracting following for advertisement and marketing purposes.
The 11 Herbs and Spices campaign occurred in September 2017 when KFC unfollowed 35.5 thousand users from its followership. KFC later followed back 11 users, five who were Spice Girls and six men who were christened Herb. As Kfc.com (n.d) explain, the food chain intended to create a form of original recipe that had six spices and fiver herbs. The motive was to make people around the world recognize the truth being the 11 followers. After two months passed, a man named Edge unravelled the puzzle and posted a Tweet on Twitter. Consequently, the tweet by Edge created a whopping 360,000 mentions and 2.5 billion impressions making the social media campaign one of the most famous.
From the information discussed in Unit V lesson, KFC 11 herbs and spices PR campaign was successful due to way the tweet was crafted in a compelling message. The campaign succeeded since the post was made on a social media platform which offers an almost borderless way in message transmission (Kfc.com, n.d). The tweet reached a staggering number of users on twitter leading to a rise in sales. Twitter offered an unlimited scope and reach leading to more than two billion impressions and hundreds of thousand mentions that made the campaign a success. The stunt was a way of answering a marketing question by relying on their followers to uncover the truth ( Lafferty, 2018) . The effectiveness of the campaign is evidenced by the voracious retweets that followed and the widespread reach achieved.
To improve PR through social media, KFC can consider using influencers to give the company’s brands a voice which KFC cannot use on its own. KFC ought to sign brand influencers who have huge following on social media to promote its offerings. Creating a brand relationship with an influencer would enable KFC add another line of promotion to defend the product offer to its advantage. KFC can also undertake an exercise to identify brand threats. The food chain should utilize available social media listening tools to capture user’s thoughts. Engaging users would lead to revelation of threats that should be addressed to prevent a potential brand reputation crisis ( Kim, 2016) . KFC can undertake content distribution to facilitate brand message which is a tried and proved social media tactic. The outfit should curate content and align the messages with brand values and PR objectives.
Conclusion
Social media campaigns offer an effective avenue to market communication and advertise brands. KFC use of Twitter led to a massive reach to intended global audience thereby making the campaign successful. Public relations campaign on social media offers a borderless way of reaching masses through videos, messages, audios or photographs. Using influencers, identifying brand threats and curating content improves PR through social media.
References
Kfc.com (n.d). What made us great is still what makes us great, https://www.kfc.com/about
Kim, C. M. (2016). Social media campaigns: Strategies for public relations and marketing . Routledge.
Lafferty, P. (2018). Marketing Musketeers and the Revolution. Journal of Current Issues & Research in Advertising , 39 (3), 308-310.
Twitter.com (n.d). When it happens it happens on Twitter, https://about.twitter.com/en_us.html
