by Erika Brookes

As social media continues its mainstream adoption, brands are turning to social media platforms, like our Vitrue SRM, to manage their ever-growing and sophisticated social communities. We believe the ability to segment and target audiences, especially at the local level, will be a key to success. It is marketing 101, right? Know your audience and what they want? After all, not all of McDonald’s 7.7 million Facebook users want the same thing. McDonald’s knows it and is rolling out superior segmentation and targeting capabilities to deliver relevant and timely content to their consumers where they are and in real-time.

At Vitrue we call it “Social Segmentation,” and it is basically using social technology and tools to truly target and individualize content to your fans. McDonald’s leverages its social presence not only through its national voice on its official Facebook Page and Twitter accounts but also through locally-relevant content giving their regional co-ops incredible social segmentation tools. And it allows McDonald’s 7.7 million Facebook users to get content they want: local events, coupons, specials and other targeted content. McDonald’s is enabling highly personalized, targeted and relevant social content to its fans that gets customers in the door and drives sales. That’s true “Social Segmentation” that garners incredible engagement and results—a real ROI.

Early last year, McDonald’s began to implement localized functionalities. The fast-food giant empowered the fans of McDonald’s to “Get Local” with localized content on Facebook, while maintaining global brand consistency throughout the Facebook experience. Consumers can enter their zip codes to receive locally relevant content like polls, coupons, events, etc. Fans can also share their experience by uploading photos (and soon videos) to their local Tab view. The Vitrue SRM Platform gives local control with corporate oversight and smart segmentation capabilities. This is a tremendous resource for consumers, co-op marketers, and McDonald’s corporate.

McDonald’s is now taking it up a notch by implementing open graph object functionality to allow users to raise their hand and tell what they like about McDonald’s. This gets interesting from a business standpoint because the open graph allows for segmented publishing to the news feed of McDonald’s local likers. McDonald’s will be able to further drive engaging conversations and local content to users that have expressed an interest.

For example, currently, if you like one of the Angus Burgers on McDonalds.com, or anywhere across the web, you can click the like button and virally spread the love to your friends on Facebook. Your 500 friends will see you like the Angus Burgers…maybe like it and share that with their 600 friends…and on it goes. Is anyone getting hungry?

Coming soon, McDonald’s will roll out the capability to further target users who have “liked” a McDonald’s product by publishing directly to their Facebook newsfeed. Now, not only does your “like” of an object share virally with your friends but you’ll start receiving content about that object in your newsfeed like coupons, polls, specials and events. McDonald’s can deliver content to me by location and by product preferences – directly to my newsfeed. Talk about taking those 7.7 million Facebook fans and really getting to know them. That’s targeted marketing.

In order to easily create and manage the various open graph objects for McDonald’s, Vitrue built a custom object builder within the Vitrue Publisher platform. This single interface will enable them to create the objects and publish to them with ease. It’s highly targeted marketing made easy by technology.

Bottom line: Brands must begin segmenting their growing audiences/fans to better deliver content the fans want in order to keep the relationship of value to the consumer. Today’s technology allows for these more sophisticated and much-needed functionalities. As usual, the Golden Arches are pioneering in the marketing world. And that is something that can make us all say “We’re Lovin’ It!”