Wendy's Is Doing Twitter Right

I have been seeing Wendy's Twitter posts a lot lately on social media, where people have been voluntarily posting screenshots of their responses.  This is a very clever and inexpensive way to increase brand awareness.

The most recent campaign I have heard about was when a 16 year old student posted a question about how may retweets he would need to get free chicken nuggets for a year.  Here's the exchange:

Their response of 18 million has started a campaign of #nuggsforcarter on Twitter, which has gone far beyond twitter.  There is now a website (www.nuggsforcarter.com), has been discussed on Ellen, and has been written up in numerous news articles - this is a LOT of free advertising for Wendy's.  Not to mention that the tweet in question has been retweeted 3.2M times as of this writing, similar to Ellen Degeneres' record of 3.2M retweets.  

Through simple engagement, this exchange has made internet history.  The takeaways: stay connected with your audience and be engaged - look at the response times on the set of tweets - they responded in less than 2 minutes.  They are also setting a fun image for their business through their twitter account, which is likely engaging a youthful target audience.