In recent years a number of corporations have taken to curating their online personalities by using social media platforms such as twitter. These accounts often post their own take on currently popular memes, engage in banter with their followers, or deliver “clapback’s” to taunting comments they receive.
Of these accounts, the most ubiquitous is the Wendy’s twitter account. In early January 2017, twitter users began noticing that the corporate Wendy’s account was beginning to drastically change their tweeting style. The posts that had once consisted solely of promotional notices about various specials at Wendy’s stores began to change to playful conversations with their followers and frequent putdowns of their fast food competition. This change in marketing strategy clearly worked for Wendy’s; during January 2017 the Wendy’s account gained 350,000 followers, (roughly %35 percentage of their followers in 2016).
The popularity of Wendy’s account could be seen clearly in January 2018, when the Wendy’s social media team used the popular online forum, Reddit, to host an ask-me-anything where they would respond to any questions leveled at them by their followers. Not only did this AMA receive over 42,000 upvotes, but some users also voluntarily gifted the Wendy’s team Reddit gold. Reddit gold for those who are not familiar with the platform, is a form of premium membership for the free-to-use site that gives its owner certain special privileges and additional functionality when using Reddit. While this type of interaction is not uncommon on Reddit, users will often gift some of their Reddit gold to other users who post content that they enjoy, however the example with the Wendy’s team was a novel occurrence. This was not average users encouraging other average Reddit users, but was instead a group of people giving away goods they paid for to a large fast-food corporation.
At first I thought that these corporate social media accounts attempting to rebrand themselves in this new quirky, “relatable” way was just the newest occurrence of brands attempting to change their image, but the more I thought about the dynamic between these accounts and their followers, the more intrigued I became with the consequences of this rebranding. As can be seen in the above example, individual interactions with corporations online are beginning to resemble interactions between any two average social media users.
Obviously we all know that these are trained advertising professionals behind these corporate accounts, rather than the personalities they portray, however it is not always so easy to act according to this fact. I myself have recently been surprised by how difficult it is for me to separate the actions of the large corporations from their manicured online personas. I was recently having a conversation in which a friend of mine was telling me about the lack of sustainable farming techniques used by most fast-food restaurants. And while I certainly knew that these corporations were not their online personalities, I found myself not viewing them as harshly when I inadvertently remembered all the humorous posts from their accounts. As corporations advertise more on the platforms we routinely use to connect with friends, it will only become more difficult to separate these companies from their online presences, and consumers will need to try harder to keep in mind the true nature of these corporations and the consequences of their actions in order to make informed purchasing decisions.