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Social Media Strategy

Prepared by:

Group 1

Student Name Student ID

Arifa Humaira 21341017

Md Zunayed Zedan 22104176

Nayeema Nazmul Khan 20105008

Zaheen Haque 20105018

Yeamin Ahmed 20105019

Onirudha Khan Saadi 20105055

Course Title: Business Communication

Course Code: BUS201

Summer 2022

Section: 08

Prepared for:

Mr. Tausif Bari

Lecturer, BRAC Business School

Brac University

Date of Submission: Wednesday, 24 August, 2022

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Table of Contents
Introduction 03
Introduction to the Selected Organization 04
Challenges Faced by the Burger King on Social Media 04
Solution to the Challenges 8
Analysis 9
Recommendations 10
Conclusion 12

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Introduction
Social Media is one of the most frequently used platforms people use to stay connected even
being thousands of miles apart. People are now more connected and conscious of what is
happening on other edges of the world. Organizations have decided to utilize this strength of
Social Media and started benefiting from it. Social media strategy for promoting businesses is
the most commonly used strategy currently as people are more active and aware of every
update. However, not all organizations were able to successfully promote themselves through
social media as it requires an immense amount of marketing skill. Moreover, in order to gain
popularity, they must be aware of the demographic information of the targeted audience and
work accordingly. Social media is a place where people are prepared to critically examine every
step prominent companies make and give negative feedback at any chance thrown at them.
Hence, in this paper, how our chosen organization is using social media as a bridge to connect
with more customers and how their decisions are leading them to face backlashes are going to
be assessed. Social media strategies are especially emphasized nowadays due to a couple of
reasons. Three major ones are;
● Marketing : this segment emphasizes on understanding consumers, their behavior and
their preferences towards the product. By adopting a careful analysis method, the
company aspires to build brand awareness followed by a customer acquisition.
● Employee Engagements : This segment prioritizes on developing the company culture,
improving internal collaborations and recruiting potential candidates who would
contribute towards enhancing the efficiency of the company.
● Collaboration : in this segment, a company focuses more on creating a social space
where partners, influential individuals, suppliers and consumers come together and build
a community. This is one of the key methods through which a company enhances their
brand value and brand awareness.

The very definition of the social media strategy has not been fixed yet and has remained to be
controversial and highly opinionated. Unifying how social media is integrated into the business

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depicts a clear indication of the level of the sustainability and growth potential of a business.
Internally this strategy creates a certain identity and culture within the company. Although this
has more importance in external factors. Community engagement has been one epicenter of
maintaining a social media strategy. In this way the company can easily communicate with their
consumers in terms of reactions and opinions of the consumers in the shortest time basis
possible. Therefore it widens the range of improving the service and the quality of the product
for the company.

Introduction of the selected organization

The organization we chose to analyze is Burger King.

It is one of the most elite franchises with over 18700 outlets around the world (Flynn, 2022) that
are renowned across the globe. Burger king is popularly known for its burgers, fries, and a wide
variety of other items. They have been following the trend of promoting through social media for
a long time and during this journey, they have gained the attention of numerous customers.
However, as easy as it sounds, it is not always the case that they receive positive reviews. They
have been victims of countless challenges trying to promote their products and in turn, ruined
their reputation several times. Therefore, companies nowadays anticipate objections before
releasing news on social media.

Challenges faced by Burger King on social media

Burger King throughout the decades has been advertising their brand and most of the
campaigns have turned out to be a success. However, trying to get the best of both worlds, they
messed things up and went through a series of consequences numerous times. Burger King
mostly implements their strategies on Facebook and Twitter, as these are the most actively used
Social media all around the world. Burger King has different Facebook pages for every country
as there are several groups of people with distinct ethnicities and posts of promotions are made
according to that. Although, when trying to connect with different ethnic groups, they have given
wrong impressions on many occasions which have cost them a fortune. Incidents like this and
other social media strategy challenges that they have faced are going to be discussed
throughout this section.

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First and foremost, one of the most common issues customers have faced is the “expectation
vs reality”. Customers all around the world have been the victim of Burger King’s misleading
images of their Burger’s size. During their social media campaign, they promote their burgers in
a way that makes it look a lot more appealing than it is in reality to grab the attention of
customers. However, in reality, customers complained that the burgers were not served to them
in the same fashion as they looked completely different from the ones displayed on social media
(Mrozowski, 2022). Customers have claimed that they would not have spent the money if they
knew Burger King tricked them by false showcasing. Their strategy which was meant to
increase potential customers turned out to be a humiliation and resulted in a loss of regular
customers. Cuoto (2022) stated that customers took this matter all the way to court and filed a
case of false advertisement against them. Burger King’s strategy of attracting customers went in
vain and they failed to keep up with the expectations of millions. Their strategy turned out to be
a new challenge for them. These kinds of problems arise in business ethics credibility aspects.

Source: Bored Panda

Secondly, during International Women’s day in 2021, Burger King UK tried to be more
cooperative with customers as a strategy and tweeted “Women belong in the kitchen”

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(Molina,2021).

This tweet triggered hundreds of thousands of people and it went viral in a very short time.
Furthermore, the situation turned out to be a complete mockery as it was very sexist and
they faced severe casualties. However, their aim was not to provoke, the message was just
poorly executed which offended countless people. The actual intention behind their
incomprehensible message was to encourage the female employees to learn and apply for
Burger King. They had offered a scholarship program for females as there was a lack of female
chefs in their kitchen and to reduce the disparity between male and female chefs. This is why
they initiated this event. After realizing their mistake they deleted the original tweet and
apologized for the offense they caused. Their strategy to grab attention backfired with several
drawbacks. It evidently shows that Burger King lacks proper Social media strategic
administration. Scars in social media last forever and this is one of them which will hurt their

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reputation every time people drag it from the past. Proper communicating skills and team
planning are some of the key challenges most companies face and Burger King seems to have
topped them all. Here, the AIDA model has been followed and with that the prompt response
and initiating conversations has been the highlight but certainly not in the proper way.

In another similar case, during one of their campaigns in the month of mental awareness, they
tried to promote their new burgers with names according to different moods of people
(Graham, 2019). They tried to bring profit by using this as a pillar and promote by showing how
they care about people suffering from mental issues. Some people took the advertisement in a
positive way whereas patients with mental health issues mocked Burger King’s approach over
social media which backfired them with negative feedback. They took the wrong approach to
attract customers. Choosing a proper approach without hurting the emotions of potential
customers is also considered one of their responsibility and strategy in social media. Yet they
still did not ban it or find a solution to it.

Thirdly, security from hackers of social media accounts has turned out to be an issue. This is
one of the routine challenges of almost all companies. Burger King was not an exception, their
Twitter account got hacked, and inappropriate information was tweeted (Baker, 2013). The
hacker spreaded misleading details stating that “Burger King is sold to Mcdonald's” who is their
arch nemesis and the display picture was also changed to a picture of Mcdonald’s logo (Baker,
2013). Although, the account was recovered later and the situation lightened gradually.
Therefore, the safety of social media accounts is a challenge they are always conscious of.
Here relying on the news media too much also got them to such tragedies.

Finally, also among the biggest social media problems that Burger King faces is their failure to
be a direct threat to their biggest rival McDonalds. Although both are franchise policy holders
and operate their business in a similar fashion but in terms of maintaining the social media
familiarity and ease to the consumers, Burger King has massively failed compared to
McDonalds. To demonstrate this problem, let’s look at both of the franchises' slogans.
McDonalds uses one of the classic slogans which is, “I’m lovin it”, On the other hand, Burger
King's slogan is, “Have it your way” which is comparatively harder to remember in contrast to
McDonalds. The slogan also creates a certain sense of feeling in the consumer which illustrates
they will have more control over their orders which is often failed to be provided by the
franchises. Additionally, both of the companies use a logo which illustrates a major usage of the

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color Yellow. But in terms of eye-pleasing and ease of recognising, McDonalds has far crossed
the Burger King. The logo of McDonalds is easily recognisable whereas to someone who is not
well familiar with the logo of the Burger King will have a hard time understanding the concept
behind the logo upon the first glaze. This results in a failure in terms of creating Brand loyalty.
Brand loyalty is a concept which shapes the consumers preference to one particular brand over
another and it consists of some factors such as; Iconic Products, Catchy Slogans, Recognisable
Muscots and a strong visual identity in which Burger King has failed to keep up with McDonalds.
Brand identity aids the consumer to connect with the products to a personal level through which
their preference becomes more prone towards one particular brand over another and social
media plays a big role in terms of creating this brand identity. Instead of prioritizing on the
creation of a positive brand image, they are getting more and more controversial in terms of
their social media acquisitions which is directly impacting on their sales. That is the social
media champions of this particular brand are not that strong and have resourceful strategies.

Solutions to the challenges

We learned in our first challenge that Burger King portrayed their burgers much larger than what
they delivered in reality. They deceived their customers into purchasing their items by a fake
visual presentation of the burgers. However, after getting filed a case against them, they learned
from their mistakes and are constantly working on how to improve the customer experience.
They are now extra cautious about this matter and are always trying to stay in touch with the
customers by asking if they are satisfied or not with their service. They are planning to give
actual images of their items during social media promotion in their next campaign and not
mislead their customers. This brings credibility to the ethical aspects of the business.

Communication skills among the departments and teamwork would have helped them dodge
such challenges and mishaps. As teamwork brings diversity of views and with a democratic
decision making process they could avoid such situations. But still there is very less
implementation of this which resulted in another mishap as stated in the second challenge. A
witty tease for a promotion promoting a culinary scholarship for female employees, the 5 word
tweet "women belong in the kitchen" went downhill and sparked a fireball from people on social
networking sites(Forbes, 2021). Given around are aimed to shift the female representation.
Unfortunately, despite subsequent deletion, their first tweet did not help them avoid attention as
stated by (Kelleher, 2021) from the Forbes article. It happens to have a considerably greater
reach with more audience engagement than the tweet bringing the scholarship program to

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surface. In order to minimize audience misunderstanding, they changed the medium of

communication and used printed advertisements for their campaign that carried the original
message—"women belong in the kitchen"—but this time with additional details. The ad was
printed in the New York times. It was more audience-focused, emphasizing the advantages they
would receive from the campaign and stressing that women belonged in all professional
kitchens, whether they were award-winning, haute cuisine or even Burger King restaurants.
They raised concern over the low number of women holding chef roles in America (24% for
general cooks and as low as 7% for head chefs). It was said that two female employees will get
grants of $25,000 apiece for culinary study. These all undoubtedly had a significant impact in
altering the trajectory of the collapse.
Burger King introduced another initiative to raise awareness about mental health, featuring

As the safety of Burger King had been suspended due to the hacking incident. Burger King had
to immediately shut down their twitter activities to prevent any form of additional harm which
later on resulted in a temporary suspension of the account. Although this has not caused any
real hit to the sales or any revenue of the Burger King but this act has caused massive
embarrassment to their brand image, Later on McDonalds had also sympathized with Burger
King by posting on Twitter. Also, Burger King themself came up with a statement of a thorough
explanation of the incident and proper reasoning behind it. In retrospect, Burger King had seen
a follower rise of thirty thousand immediately afterwards.
Analysis
Being a franchise dependent company, Burger King needs to maintain a high face value to their
consumers in order to retain and accelerate their business and social media is one of the
significant influences in terms of determining their face value. Therefore, they should prioritize
strategizing their social media activity with as much care as possible. But in reality, Burger King
is currently in the opposite stream with creating controversial social media strategies along with
some other derogatory factors which essentially is leading to their own loss of revenue in
addition to creating more and more challenges. Although on the bright side, they are addressing
these challenges with as much concern as possible with the intention of mitigating them soon.
This introduces some positive changes to their course of action in determining their social media
strategy which is expected to increase their face value compared to the competitors and
accelerate their business growth with more efficiency.

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Recommendations -
The first step which they should take is not playing with customer’s trust and emotion. Building
trust is what increases our loyalty towards them. However, the initiative which Burger King took
to promote their products were ethically wrong and heartbreaking to their customers. Actions
which they should take are either presenting the food in the same appealing manner as they
portray in their advertisements or they can just show the actual image of the burger which they
serve to their customers. However, the first approach would be better if they want to retain their
reputation game strong against their competitors and attract more potential customers.
Moreover, to please their customers and compensate for their faults, they can give their
customers discount tokens or give them free fries in order to rectify their reputation and retain
the lost trust.Thus the AIDA model here is used as needed.

The second challenge was the lack of proper communication which led them to face a serious
dilemma on social media just because of their misinterpretation of the phrase they tweeted. It
shows that their social media manager has very less understanding of how to make an
audience-centered post to grab attention. As we could see that the “women belong in the
kitchen” tweet got that all the hate on social media being their intention behind the campaign, it
got lost behind because of wrong choice of words. Had they not deleted that tweet, what could
have been better would be if they reposted the same tweet with the edited version by writing
suppose “ women too belong in the kitchen”. - this way an audience centered, proper
grammatical, meaningful non sexist sentence could have helped them to convey their real
message to the mass people. Deleting and quick response to fault is as important as to reform
and edit it to make the audience that they felt heard.Here, in this way the brand can facilitate
community building which is a crucial social media guideline.
When we are planning strategies through social media, we cannot ignore the threats the
hackers are instigating. We are seeing every day thousands of accounts are getting hacked and
how they are misleading people with bogus information and spreading rumors. This threat
keeps companies under ceaseless stress. We already know that Burger King has been through
this complication once and to stay protected from hackers, we are going to come up with some
recommendations that, if followed, may keep them protected in the future. To begin with, the first
step of the process is to never use public wifi networks as they do not protect our information.
Hackers can easily retrieve the information if we use public wifi networks. Therefore, the lesson
is to always use private networks. And with that an important stance of Legal compliance is

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established for the brand. Secondly, they should activate the two-factor authentication which
improves the security of their account. For instance, if someone tries to log in to their account
from any unrecognized device, an instant notification will go to the owner warning them about
the attempt to breach privacy. Thirdly, never visit websites that have sketchy and short links.
Visit trusted websites only in order to stay protected. Furthermore, they should never access
their accounts through third party applications as there are numerous reports where people
have found themselves victims of hackers because of their use of unauthorized apps. Finally,
they should regularly change their passwords and create passwords which are unique and
difficult to guess. If they follow these recommended steps, they can improve their social media
experience and stay safe from the nemesis of internet users.
Subsequently, in terms of their brand image and loyalty management they need to prioritize
more on their customers preferences in addition to focusing more on bringing in simplistic
ingenuity to their slogans and mascots. In this way, consumers will have more inclination
towards the brand and also will build a personal connection with it. That is with those in their list
the brand will be networked well and will fulfill multidimensional aspects of conversion
marketing and social commerce.

The last problem that has been mentioned is that Burger King compared to its rival Mcdonald’s
has less attractive slogans and mascots that would build massive influence in their marketing
areas. As in those regards it is behind, Burger King decided to use social media to be the trend
among the users and they really chose a very controversial pathway that quite did not bring
them huge positive response that would help the branding and sales of their franchise. So what
needs to be done is to identify and support social media champions. These are the main
drivers of the whole social media marketing. They are ones that strategize and execute digital
media concepts and actively respond to emergencies and tragedies.When the champions are
strong enough and sufficient with resources and ideas and innovative ideas to tackle situations
or problems- even the above other mentioned problems wouldn't have arised. The social media
champions should be held responsible for any kind of social media failure and thus the team
must be built as perfect as the franchise wants the deliverables to be.

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Conclusion
To conclude, we have seen the social media strategies that Burger King has carried out and
amidst this process we have figured out the challenges they have faced during their marketing
campaign in social media. Every company has their own problems and so does Burger King,
they have faced several challenges while marketing their brand and trying to promote their new
items. Amidst this process, they faced numerous backlashes against their strategy which they
were not prepared for and had to face serious consequences. Nevertheless, they did come up
with solutions to those challenges and thought they cleared the obstacle in their path but it was
just a temporary fix. There are still many loopholes to be fixed and to help them we have come
up with some recommendations based on those challenges and added some more strategies to
make their marketing strategy in social media much more effective. The necessary steps have
been explained properly to make sure they understand where they lack at.

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References
Suciu, P. (n.d.). Burger King Pride Campaign Faces Backlash On Social Media. Forbes.
Retrieved August 24, 2022.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/petersuciu/2022/06/06/burger-king-pride-campaign-faces-b
acklash-on-social-media/?sh=6987f55e19e5
Baker, R. (2013, February 19). Burger King falls prey to Twitter hack. Marketing Week.
https://www.marketingweek.com/burger-king-falls-prey-to-twitter-hack/
Zamora, R. (2013, December 4). Social Media Champion Checklist. Off the Cusp.
https://www.offthecusp.com/social-media-champion-checklist
Graham, M. (2019, May 3). Burger King faces backlash after linking ad campaign to
mental health, showing the risks of cause-based marketing. CNBC; CNBC.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/03/burger-king-faces-backlash-after-linking-ad-campaign-
to-mental-health.html
Cuoto, S. (2022, April 5). Burger King lawsuit alleges false advertising, Whoppers not
whopping enough - National | Globalnews.ca. Global News.
https://globalnews.ca/news/8736884/burger-king-lawsuit-whoppers-size-false-advertising
/
Molina, B. (2021, March 8). Burger King UK under fire for tweeting “Women belong in the
kitchen” on International Women’s Day. USA TODAY.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2021/03/08/burger-king-uk-under-fire-women-bel
ong-kitchen-tweet/4627505001/

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