OAK BROOK, IL: McDonald's will kick off a social media contest on Friday, allowing consumers to participate through either the company's general or just-launched Spanish-language Twitter handle.
The restaurant chain will be able to reach a wider audience by integrating the @MeEncanta Twitter account into the “Do you want fries with that?” contest, said Cristina Alfaro, external communications manager for McDonald's USA.
VPE Public Relations, the fast-food chain's Hispanic PR AOR for nearly 20 years, is managing the account and working closely with the internal communications and social media team at McDonald's.
“Now we have an additional vehicle to reach out to our Spanish-dominant and bilingual Hispanic audiences that prefer Spanish to communicate,” she explained.
The contest prompts consumers to tweet at either @McDonalds or @MeEncanta about what they want to eat their fries with, whether with friends in other countries or while sailing on a yacht.
McDonald's will give away $25,000-worth of prizes to winners, in some cases what they tweeted about, said Alfaro.
The company launched a “dedicated” and “culturally relevant” website for the Latino community called MeEncanta.com, which is Spanish for the company's slogan “I'm lovin' it,” about seven years ago, added Alfaro. In July, it beta launched the @MeEncanta Twitter handle.
She added that Twitter is an important channel to reach Hispanic consumers because they “are very social.”
“We saw an opportunity because there are 8 million Hispanics on Twitter and about 3.6 million prefer English as a way to communicate, 2.5 million prefer Spanish, and the rest are fine with either language,” she said.
The @MeEncanta handle has more than 1,300 followers. Although the @McDonalds account has nearly 200,000 followers, Alfaro said the company is concentrating “on the quality of engagement rather than the quantity of followers at this point.”
