McDonald’s and Pinterest – What are People Pinning?

We've been tracking what people are pinning to Pinterest from McDonald’s website. It’s not what we expected.

As far as their corporate account, our favorite Pinterest board from McDonald’s (tough to choose just one) is the one that shows menu items from all over the world. As in all things food France seems to win. The French menu includes the McBaguette, Le McWrap Chevre and even Macarons.

Unfortunately for McDonald’s, someone beat them to their name. So instead of Pinterest.com/McDonalds (taken by someone with the last name McDonald) they had to take Pinterest.com/McDonaldsCorp

This seems to be a trend. Pizza Hut doesn’t have Pinterest.com/Pizzahut – interesting enough they don’t even have a food board. Instead Pizza Hut uses Pinterest for recruiting employees!

Pinterest tells you who repins what you have on Pinterest but they don’t tell you about original pins. PinAlerts sends you an email with original pins – or whenever people pin something from directly from your website. What surprised us is that McDonald’s doesn’t get a huge volume of pins (you should see how many pins there are from Zappos or Food Network!).

What are People Pinning from McDonald’s website?
From our tracking we can see what people pin on Pinterest. It’s their favorite menu items. McDonalds.com has a full graphic-based menu on the site. People go to this and pin what they love. You’d think it would be all hamburgers and french fries but it’s not. There’s a huge variety.

We couldn’t find a Pinterest account for Burger King or any pins from their website. We found this fun board from an individual. http://pinterest.com/nays/my-burger-king-board/ which included this wacky knit burger fashion statement (with sesame seeds on top):

Pinterest can showcase new or unknown menu items (we wish they’d note which state or countries offered the items).

For example, we didn’t know that McDonald’s has smores pies or soft serve ice cream dipped in chocolate until we saw a PinAlert like this:

Lessons learned from McDonald’s:

If you’re a restaurant or in the food business, make it easy for people to pin their favorite menu item and share it with their friends (with their comments) on Pinterest.

Create standalone images of your most popular dishes or individual images of everything on your menu.

Other Fast Food Restaurants Getting Pinned, Not Burger King
For some reason Burger King is not popular on Pinterest, even though they have images of every menu item too. Any guesses as to why? Is it because more moms like McDonalds and men (who are less interested in Pinterest) like Burger King?

Subway is getting pinned. So is Pizza Hut, KFC and Wendy’s. Just not Burger King.