Popeyes Chicken Sandwich wouldn’t have blown up the way it did if not for a tweet. Our entire strategy was rooted in the media placement. Twitter allowed for the kind of audience reactions, engagement and co-creation that made the #ChickenWars go viral.

Our challenge was to launch Popeyes’ first-ever Chicken Sandwich in a loud, competitive category dominated by Chick-fil-A, who owned more than 50% of the chicken sandwich market despite being closed on Sundays.

As the sandwich slowly rolled out across the country through a series of market tests, the response had been very favorable, with many people tweeting that Popeyes Chicken Sandwich beat the competition.

Our objective was to gain as much market share as we could. We needed to generate and sustain organic hype to encourage trial and convert eaters into believers.

But Popeyes was still the underdog. Gaining any market share was going to be tough, so we had to be smart and create a cultural moment.

The buzz was okay when the sandwich went nationwide on August 12. But the sandwich wasn’t a viral hit—yet.

Chick-fil-A invented the chicken sandwich and dominated the market. But our social listening showed that many Americans were becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the brand’s donations to anti-LGBTQ groups and were hungry for a tastier, “homophobia-free” alternative.

We’d also spent the last year perfecting our brand voice and building an engaged following, particularly among Black Twitter users (Black Twitter describes the network of mostly African American Twitter users who tend to be more active on the platform. They are highly creative content creators and responsible for starting many social trends).

So we knew the right tweet could unleash an army to fight for Popeyes.

So when Chick-fil-A tweeted, “Bun + Chicken + Pickles = all the [heart emoji] for the original,” we pounced.

We quickly responded with a perfectly on-brand, “...y’all good?”

As we looked to launch the sandwich on social—where a lot of the initial hype around the sandwich was growing—we kept our strategy simple: let our food (and fans) do all the talking. We wanted people to believe the hype.

We created a 360-degree campaign based on user-generated content from Popeyes fans who got early access to the sandwich in market tests. On social media, these reviews were slowly getting meme’d and spread throughout various Twitter subcommunities.

This allowed us to act quickly and wisely when Chick-fil-A tweeted. Our audience was ready for us to hit Chick-fil-A, but we had to do it in a way that felt true to Popeyes. We aren’t a brand that roasts people on Twitter, so our response had to be subtle. This approach also pushed our fans to jump in for us and say everything our lawyers wouldn’t let us.

Executing a two-word tweet seems simple enough.

But writing it and getting client—and legal—approval in a matter of minutes only happened because we had a system in place specifically designed for real-time reaction posts.

Text and WhatsApp message chains allowed us to communicate instantly with the whole team, write the perfect tweet, and get it approved and posted at exactly the right time to capitalize on this moment.

This tweet scaled to 84,500 retweets, 318,400 likes, 5,000 comments and countless news mentions. Black Twitter made memes, celebrities posted without getting paid, talk show hosts joked and lines wrapped around the block.

(By the way, that entire 360-degree campaign we’d created got pushed after the unprecedented success of our tweet. After Popeyes sold out its entire sandwich supply, we no longer needed paid advertising.)

Popeyes Chicken Sandwich went from getting 4,000 to 140,000 tweets a day (Crimson Hexagon + Brandwatch).

Popeyes became the #1 Google search, trended #1 on Twitter twice and added more Twitter followers in a week than in the last 2.5 years (Forbes).

Store traffic shot up 256% and stayed high, hitting +300% for the sandwich’s return and eventually stabilizing months later at 40% higher than before the tweet (Forbes and Sense360).

Popeyes saw the largest QSR market share increase ever tracked by analytics firm Sense360, sold its entire 10-week supply of Chicken Sandwiches in eight days (internal data) and had its best quarter ever with sales up 42% (CNN).

Restaurant Business Executive Editor Jonathan Maze tweeted that they “could find no other restaurant chain that can even come close to matching Popeyes sales numbers.”

With no paid media, this tweet earned 8 billion impressions worth $87 million (Cision).

We didn’t actually have a budget for this. This was all based on an unpaid tweet.