Finding business applications for social media is hard. Tracking campaigns and measuring their effectiveness is often an inexact science. More and more business are using check-in awards, mayorship deals and frequency specials to lure in more customers.
McDonalds has changed all that and announced this week at the Mobile Social Communications conference that the international restaurant chain was able to increase foot traffic to stores by 33 percent in one day with a little Foursquare help, as reported by Econsultancy.
McDonalds offered 100 randomly awarded $5 or $10 gift cards by checking-in at one of its restaurants on Foursquare Day, 16 April. The results were clear: 33 percent more foot traffic on the day of the campaign, and 600,000 people opted to follow and fan the brand on various social media sites.
The campaign cost a paltry $1,000.
For a company that spends millions of dollars a year on advertising, this goes to show that campaigns of all sizes and budgets can have a meaningful impact.
There’s debate over whether its possible lots of people “checked-in” from McDonalds that day without actually going to a store. But even if that’s the case, McDonalds believes there was a lot of value to the campaign.
Certainly more and more business are looking to drive revenue and awareness through social media. Twitter’s announcement on Tuesday of its revamped interface is especially favorable to advertisers, as the social media site plans to give new visibility for sponsored tweets and trends, as well as content disseminated by marketers.
Very good point, Greg, and ditch all the chemicals in their food.
One thing that bothers me more than anything is when people capitalize the F when typing foursquare. The logo is even attached to this blog post and it is not in caps. Regardless, this is a great case study and one that I can add to my growing list of examples that I use when explaining how services like this are beneficial to the consumer, but equally beneficial to the retailer.
Another good example is the Gap. American Eagle also is running various campaigns that I have taken advantage of myself. Even Starbucks played around with foursquare campaigns. But a word of advice to any retailer that is running a campaign like this. Educate your employees. Don't make me have to explain to you what foursquare is so that you can stand there confused, have to get a manager, and force me to have to explain the same story twice.
Just today I was in American Eagle and the cashier had no idea what foursquare was and needed a manager to get approval for the discount. That should not happen, and it makes your individually run campaigns look weak and outdated.
But again, thanks for sharing this and it is nice to see that there are companies, bit and small alike, that are benefiting from this service.
Jenny Craig should hire foursquare to make Americans 33% less fat.
Maybe Foursquare should team up with the government and raise employment by 33 percent so I can check my ass into a job.
@Roger – exactly, it's very easy ofr McDonalds to do this but then you wouldn't have a sensational headline :)
@Jiepang – do you know what QR codes are? build this into your app and then people would need to be at least "in the building" to do the checkin process.
This should be easy to measure. Why can't McDonalds compare the number of transactions in each participating store on foursquare day with the transactions of the same day for the week prior?
Check in and foot traffic is really not the same thing. I do Bus Dev at the foursquare clone of China (www.jiepang.com) and we have plenty of places that have huge amount of check ins but true foot traffic is very very difficult to measure. Something that an LBS has yet to overcome is fake checkins and actual proof that money is spent. No one has done that yet, and until someone does – analytics are really hard to determine.
@Kevgah, totally.
I'm not sure who screwed up the article – foursquare spinning astroturf or the reporter trying to write a "headline grabbing article".
No way in hell sales went up 33% in one day.
That's what everyone is reporting….
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&…
wow, it sounds great for Mac donalds. They have also helped my company, http://www.onlyrooms.com grow by 17% in a week. which is still huge
RT @BreakingWeb: Sorry, But McDonald's Did Not See a 33% Increase in Foot Traffic Because of Foursquare http://bit.ly/dttGFO
Check in's not foot traffic. 33percent lift in foot traffic to a multiple billion dollar business would translate into billions. Need to think rather than repurpose content.