Popeyes Chicken Wars | Social Media

Last summer, a two-word, unpaid tweet made Popeyes the year’s hottest brand, sold a 10-week supply of Chicken Sandwiches in eight days and forever changed their business.

Background

When Popeyes launched its new Chicken Sandwich, they were the underdog in a category dominated by Chick-fil-A. 

Gaining any market share was going to be tough. So we had to be smart.

The good news: Chick-fil-A was a guilty pleasure for many people who disagreed with their conservative stances. We’d been listening carefully on social media, so we knew the right tweet could unleash an army. 

We just needed the right moment. 

Work

Buzz was okay when the sandwich went nationwide on August 12. 

But a week later, our moment came. Chick-fil-A tweeted, “Bun + Chicken + Pickles = all the ❤️ for the original.”

We quickly responded with a perfectly on-brand “…y’all good?”

Our Community

Popeyes didn’t just get lucky with this tweet. We’d put in the time over the previous year to perfect our social voice and build a very engaged fanbase on Twitter. We knew exactly what to say and when to pounce to make the internet go crazy. 

Results

The sandwich went from getting about 4,000 tweets a day to 140,000 (Crimson Hexagon + Brandwatch).

Black Twitter made memes, celebrities posted without getting paid, talk show hosts joked and lines wrapped around the block.

Popeyes became the top Google search. 

And the brand added more Twitter followers the week of “…y’all good?” than it did in the first half of 2019 plus all of 2018 and 2017 combined (Forbes).

Popeyes had its best quarter in two decades (CNBC), thanks to sandwich sales being 16 times more than projected (Forbes). 

The week after the tweet, Popeyes saw the largest QSR market share increase ever tracked by analytics firm Sense360. 

Store traffic shot up 256% and stayed high, eventually stabilizing five months later at 40% higher than before this tweet (Sense360).

On the media front, “…y’all good?” earned 8 billion impressions worth $87 million dollars in earned media (Cision).

Not bad for a two-word, unpaid tweet.