Simply sharing a tweet or Instagram post about the 11 herbs & spices wouldn’t do us any good. It would just come across as yet another ad from a fast food brand trying to talk about their ingredients or process. If we were to meet our objective of both awareness AND engagement, we needed to use the social platforms in a more unexpected way.

So rather than blasting out our message about the 11 herbs & spices, our idea was simple: hide an easter egg in KFC’s Twitter account by following only 11 people—six guys named Herb and all five Spice Girls. We quietly unfollowed the 35,000 accounts KFC was following, followed our Herbs and Spices, and then waited.

After planting our easter egg, we waited. And waited. And waited.

Finally, one Twitter user, Mike “@edgette22” Edge, tweeted about his discovery. While he wasn’t the first to do so, something about his tweet set off a whirlwind of conversation. In a matter of days, his tweet began to rack up thousands upon thousands of likes and retweets. News outlets across the country began to pick up the story.

We quickly replied to him, asking him to reach out when he was ready, which was both a reference to his original tweet (“KFC follows 11 accounts. 5 Spice Girls and 6 guys named Herb. 11 Herbs & Spices. I need time to process this.”) and a subtle way to buy us more time to prepare our response.

To reward @edgette22, we sent him a painting of him with the Colonel, which also gave us one more boost of earned coverage.

We never anticipated just how big it would be.

In the first 48 hours alone, our easter egg generated 1.6M mentions on Twitter.

Thanks to @edgette22’s tweet, KFC’s 11 herbs & spices were talked about nearly everywhere, in places like Thrillist, Time, Uproxx, Fox News, Complex, Food & Wine, Refinery29, Eater, Huffington Post, AV Club, CNET, and BuzzFeed, to name a few. It even spread across the globe, showing up in places like the Sun, on CNN Philippines, and in Lifehacker Australia.

It was the #1 post on Reddit’s front page with over 113,000 upvotes, and popular Instagrammer @fuckjerry posted about it, gathering over 486,000 likes. It was even immortalized on Know Your Meme.

To date, his tweet has over 317,000 retweets and 707,000 likes.

Best of all, the Twitter joke cost nothing to execute, save for the painting we sent to our intrepid Twitter sleuth.