By: Stacey Furtado
Boston is home to over 1,000 startups and 250,000 college students. Subsequently, it’s also home to one hell of a lot of pizza. During National Pizza Month (October), we took a look at two of the largest pizza brands on Facebook to see what was cooking in their communities. Overall, we found that both brands we looked at had high fan engagement on a huge volume of posts. No surprise the topic of pizza dominated the conversation for both brands, but how the conversation played out varies significantly between the two based on two very different social marketing strategies.
Domino’s strategy focused on shareable posts that aligned with popular trends of the moment. From memes to catchphrases, it ran the gamut in a variety of content that seemed targeted to the college crowd. There’s definitely a sharp contrast in Pizza Hut’s Facebook approach, focusing instead on product photos and special offers. We put the two brands toe-to-toe and looked directly at the health of their communities to see who’s winning on social.
The Verdict
By the numbers, Pizza Hut bests Domino’s in Community Size and total number of fans who have engaged beyond an initial “like”. Anecdotally, it also leads the pack in percentage of fans who include “please” in their comments, perhaps a result of the brand’s polite Midwestern roots, compared to a more demanding “Want” as the second most frequent word in fan comments for Texas based Domino’s. Domino’s, however, still wins our head-to-head battle. The passionate core of the Domino’s community is stronger. While both brands score similarly on PTAT (or percent of fans engaged within a rolling 7 days) at right around .7%, Domino’s is driving a full 6% of fans who do engage through a comment, wall post, or share to come back and interact week over week. Pizza hut scored lower, with only 3.2% motivated to reengage. No matter how you slice it, fans engaged and coming back for more is a recipe for a great community, and sways the win to Domino’s.
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