Dairy Queen is Social Media Royalty

Written By: Shelby Veldman

Dairy Queen has been around for 70 years (since 1940) but only become involved in social media within the past two years.  Dairy Queen is a very social brand by nature so engaging customers in social media aspects have been key.

Their social media conquest began with a Facebook Fan Page in the spring of 2008.  Currently over 1,076,000 people "Like" this page.  The official Dairy Queen blog and Twitter account was launched in early 2009 and has been used to ignite conversation with customers.  The blog and Twitter page includes stories, news, products, events, promotion, and nearly anything else.  It is a perfect example of how a brand can use social media successfully by not focusing on specific public relation issues.  The main purpose is to connect with customers and not by pushing the brand name onto the people, the brand will be recognized successfully, but not through force.

Dairy Queen had 1,600 followers in the summer of 2009 and now has over 7,000 followers on Twitter and sees very few negative tweets.  Results from Social Mention confirms the successful social media reputation Dairy Queen holds. The ratio of postive,neutral,negative mentions of Dairy Queen throughout the internet at this current moment is 206:621:38.  The ratio from blogs alone is 36:40:5.  Many of the nuetral mentions are due to people posting about going to or eating Dairy Queen, for example, "on lunch; & in the drive thru at Dairy Queen. :)" or DQ promotions; "DAIRY QUEEN Happy Hour 8:30am -10:30am 50% cool and refreshing "Moolattes" other select items as well."

Some more unique digital marketing strategies for Dairy Queen include the DQ store locater app for iPhone users, an interactive online game, the Blizzard fan club, and a seperate page for the Blizzard Mobile which is currently touring US and Canada giving out free mini-Blizzards in celebration of the beloved Blizzard's 25th anniversary.

The DQ brand started social media late but eventually realized how important it was and embraced he new, untraditional method of advertising.  I commend a 70 year old brand for breaking out of traditional methods and becoming a social media king -or in this case, queen.