Social Media Monitoring Project TACO BELL

TACO BELL...

About The Company:

Taco Bell is an American chain of fast foods restaurant based in Irvine California. A subsidiary of Yum! Brands Inc...They serve a variety of TEX-MEX foods including tacos,burritos, quesadillas, nachos other specialty items, and a variety of "value menu"items. Taco Bell serves more than 2 billion customers each year in more than 6,500 restaurants mostly in the U.S., more than 80 percent of which are owned and operated by independent franchisees.

Taco Bell was founded by Glen Bell, who first opened a hot dog stand called Bell’s Drive-In in San  Bernardino, California in 1946 when he was 23 years old. In 1950, he opened Bell's Hamburgers and Hot Dogs in San Bernardino's West Side barrio. According to Gustavo Arellano, author of Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America, Bell watched long lines of customers at a Mexican restaurant called the Mitla Cafe, located across the street, which attracted a dedicated customer base for its hard-shelled tacos.Bell began eating there regularly, attempting to reverse-engineer the recipe, and eventually won the confidence of the proprietors such that they allowed him to see how the tacos and other foods were prepared. In late 1951 or early 1952, he took what he had learned and opened a new stand, this time selling tacos under the name of Taco-Tia.

Over the next few years Bell owned and operated a number of restaurants in southern California including four called El Taco. Bell sold the El Tacos to his partner and built the first Taco Bell in Downey in 1962. In 1962, he sold Taco-Tia. Kermit Becky, a former Los Angeles police officer officer, bought the first Taco Bell franchise from Glen Bell in 1964, and located it in Torrance. The company grew rapidly, and by 1967, the 100th restaurant opened at 400 South Brookhurst in Anaheim. In 1970, Taco Bell went public with 325 restaurants. In 1978, PepsiCo purchased Taco Bell from Glen Bell.

Several locations in the Midwestern United states were converted from Zantigo, a chain Minneapolis, Minnesota-based Mexican chain which PepsiCo acquired in 1986.

Taco Bell and social media marketing.

Up until recently, Taco Bell’s marketing efforts were rather rocky. The popular food chain pushed the mantras of “food-as-fuel” and, of course, “Think outside the bun.” Despite many consumers’ addiction to bean burritos, these tactics did not work. What’s more, the company was hit in 2011 with a lawsuit alleging that TacoBeall's "seasoned beef" did not consist of meat.

All these issues combined resulted in three years of flat sales and a 1.4 percent sales decline at the end of 2011.

“We were letting [the brand] become too much of a punchline,” said Brian Niccol, Taco Bell President.

However, Taco Bell has turned itself around and credits a variety of factors including social media. In fact, the company is making such an impression that it was named Ad Age 's 2013 Marketer of the year.

The company created a new tagline of “Live mas,” introduced the Cantina menu in conjunction with Chef Lorena Garcia to promote healthier options, and is testing a Power Protein menu and breakfast.

The biggest driver for the company’s 8 percent increase in same-store sales in 2012 was the launch of Doritos Locos Tacos . Although it took three years to produce the right product, Taco Bell sold 100 million Doritos Locos Tacos within its first 10 weeks. The jackpot idea continues to grow as Taco Bell introduced the Cool Ranch Doritos Locos Tacos earlier this year along with the Fiery Doritos Locos Tacos just last month. As long as Doritos are around, could the possibilities for Taco Bell be endless?

On the backend, the company also refined its marketing message. Taco Bell now strives to reach the “millennial” customer. Social media really became critical with this shift as well since the company did not simply run to Facebook and Twitter. Instead, they utilized social networks such as Vine, Pheed, and Snapchat first. This, in addition to offering exclusive peeks and deals to social media followers, only helped Taco Bell connect with the target market it wanted to reach.

Mexican food and social media may not seem like the most natural of bedfellows, but, in recent years, Mexican fast food restaurant brand Taco Bell has dedicated time, energy and resources to developing the popularity of its social media channels, with impressive results. In 2013, Taco Bell ranked as No. 1 on DigitalCoCo’s Restaurant Social Media Index, trumping key competitors such as Wendy’s, McDonalds and Starbucks.

Back in 2007, realising the growing importance of social platforms, Taco Bell’s Marketing Managers decided to take their first steps into the world of social media. In those early days, however, like many other brands, Taco Bell initially treated social merely as an announcement board for company news and to amplify the reach of its other media campaigns.

In a recent interview with CMO.com, Taco Bell’s Head of Social Media, Nick Tran, explained:

“We were taking content and commercials from other channels and repurposing them for social media.”

Today, by contrast, Taco Bell creates (and curates from UGC – user generated content) content specifically for social media and tailors each post to the particular social platform being used.

Between 2007 and 2012, Taco Bell gradually clocked up 7 million Facebook follows largely through organic growth.  At the time of writing, Taco Bell currently has 10.4 million Facebook fans and 1.18 million Twitter followers.  Taco Bell also manages accounts on several other social platforms including YouTube, Instagram, Vine, Snapchat, Pintrest, Tumblr and keeps a close eye on emerging social platforms.

TacoBells Pintrest page with about two thousand followers;

Analytical data observation:

Google trends:

 Social Mention:

"Social Mention is a social media search and analysis platform that aggregates user generated content from all over the world into a single stream of information".

Social Mention measures four metrics:

Ø  Strength: what are the chances that your brand is being discussed on social media

Ø  Sentiment: The ratio of negative mentions to positive ones

Ø  Passion: what are the chances that individuals talking about your brand will do so repeatedly

Reach: Measure of the range of influence

Ice Rocket

This website is also one way of monitoring how a brand is doing on social media.

The graph above is from ice rocket which shows the daily Blogs Citation trend for Taco Bell from the week of september 28th through the week of October 26th.Its tough to determine where the different spikes and declines originated from.
My guess is that the spikes happen after a successful ad campaign on social media for example that recent campaign of september on Instagram.

Instagram:

Instagram made another pitch advertisers,trotting out some success metrics for instagram ads for recent campaigns from Taco Bell.
Taco bell reported 12.5million 18-44 year old in the united states over a four week period with recent Instagram ad buy

The campaign which took place from March 26 to August 30, gave the brand a 29 point incremental lift in ad recall for those who were repeatedly exposed to the campaign. That's four more times higher than control group, and almost five times higher than Nielsens average for online ads. 

Engaging from the day one

While rewarding followers with incentives such as coupons and discounts is not a new idea, Taco Bell has been extremely shrewd in how it has employed this tactic. Aware of building customer anticipation for the launch of its new Cool Ranch Doritos Locos Tacos, Taco Bell offered its loyal social fans an opportunity to taste the new tacos one day prior to the national launch.

The offer generated 20,000 responses, including nearly 4,000 shares, and ultimately led to the most successful product launch in the company’s 50-year history selling 100 million units in its the first 10 weeks.

In an example of successfully utilising user-generated content, Taco Bell challenged YouTubers to create unique videos to introduce the name of the latest Doritos Locos Tacos flavor, Fiery, in August of last year, leading to more than 65 videos being created and shared by social followers.

Taco Bells facebook page showing the number of likes and how the websites popularity has grown therefore increasing its awareness and thus a way of marketing. Taco Bell also has a very interesting way of engaging its followers with funny tweets. By doing this it also shows that its is listening and talking to the groundswell.

Taco Bell's presence on yelp and peoples review in general

Taco Bell has a good number of reviews on yelp which means that people are talking about it and this is another way of listening to the groundswell.

Recommendations:

Taco Bell has done a very good job of listening and engaging the ground swell but as well i would have loved to see more engagement  or may be decide to get customers or people of the groundswell to design their own menus and more..