Social Listening

If you were on Twitter during July of 2020, you might have witnessed what some were calling the potato fiasco of 2020. If you missed it, here are a few examples:

Obviously these tweets are a bit dramatic but they definitely get their point across. 

After these tweets, and thousands more, Taco Bell came out with this post 7 months later...

I was surprised how long they took to bring back potatoes when so many of their customers were so disappointed by their departure. 

Because of the hundreds of tweets I must've seen about taking away their beloved potatoes, Taco Bell was the first company I thought of for this project. After posting about potatoes coming back, their tweets looked more like this:

Taco Bell is know as being fast and cheap food for anyone on the go, but it a staple for many of it's customers, whether they're looking for fast and cheap food or not.  

"We take pride in making the best Mexican style fast food providing fast, friendly, & accurate service. The importance of delicious food to hardworking people on a budget is a company cornerstone."

Although their value proposition is about creating food on a budget, their Instagram tells more of a luxurious story. Taco Bell, like many other company's seems to use platforms like Instagram to promote a certain lifestyle. Of course that lifestyle includes tacos and burritos, but the images are often very saturated and tend to associate their food with going on vacations, going out with friends, or even getting married. They tend to sell more of a feeling than any particular product. On platforms like Twitter, they tend to focus more on engaging with their consumer, they post polls for followers to vote on and they retweet comments from their customers, but most of their feed is made up of quoted tweets, adding a comment onto a tweet that was posted by someone else.

Overall, Taco Bell responded by bringing back items that their customers were missing and begging for. When it comes to individual comments, Taco Bell often doesn't respond when customers ask for items to come back, only when the comments are positive and talk about how much they love Taco Bell. Although in some companies I think responding to more comments might be beneficial, I think because Taco Bell is so huge and already has so many loyal customers, I don't think individual responses matter as much. 

If I were the brand manager, I would listen to the comments and take action quicker than before. It took them 7 months to come back with potatoes, that seems way too long for the amount of backlash they received. Although I don't think individual responses are necessary to keeping customers, listening to what they want on the menu is. If you don't bring back products fast enough, customers will be forced to start eating somewhere else and they may decide not to come back at all. 

After reading all of the tweets from disappointed customers, I learned how important it is to keep your customer happy. When customers are happy they talk about it, they keep coming back, and they keep spending money, which is the whole point of the business. 

Now their comments look like this, I wonder how long it will take them to bring it back....