The POTUS’ Twitter account is one of the most popular and covered Twitter feeds, making it the perfect platform to riff off of for a PR moment if the subject matter warrants participation. By seeing an opportunity for our brand to enter a conversation around our products, we leaned on our social strategy that allows us to be a participant in popular conversations, and composed a tweet we knew would get people talking. The organic buzz the tweet generated helped completely shift the way people were talking about and interacting with the brand.

The POTUS isn’t known for being the best speller on Twitter. But when he spelled something as American as the word hamburgers incorrectly in a tweet when serving up some of our very own Whoppers at the White House to the NCAA football champion Clemson Tigers, we knew we couldn’t sit back and remain silent on social. So our objective was simple: enter the conversation in a nonpartisan manner that would grab the Internet’s attention in a shareworthy way.

The idea was designed to drive social banter with not only our target audience of 18 to 24-year-olds, but also the entire Internet. By leveraging the trending conversation around the POTUS’ misspelling of the word hamburgers in his tweet, we were able to turn a political moment into a pop culture moment.

From covfefe to boarder patrol, there’s never a dull moment when it comes to the POTUS’ grammar mishaps. But this time, he went too far when he spelled hamburgers wrong in a tweet while serving Whoppers—America’s Favorite Burger®—at the White House. Knowing that we’d get a massive response from our target if we joined the conversation, we composed a simple tweet playing off the president’s misspelling, and let the world know that although a large order had been placed for hamberders earlier that day, we were still selling hamburgers to anyone who was craving something flame-grilled.

Anytime the POTUS tweets, thousands of people comment and scrutinize his posts. So our strategy was to compose a tweet in a nonpartisan manner to generate the most engagement and least amount of backlash. Our target audience is the 18 to 24-year-old demographic that’s a participant in trending conversations, which we knew would be the group to champion our tweet first. From there, once our audience had been activated, our approach was to let them organically begin spreading the word for us by retweeting, sharing, commenting, and liking the post.

The execution was in the form of a simple, organic tweet that was posted from the Burger King U.S. Twitter account and then shared by users all around the social space. The tweet was composed in a way that we knew would reach a larger audience than just our target because of the polarizing person we were referencing in the subject matter of the post. By being bold and putting the brand in the conversation around the POTUS’ known spelling mishaps, we were able to significantly scale our reach in an unprecedented way that increased overall brand love and positively influenced the brand’s perception within 24 hours.

This single tweet ended up generating some incredible numbers and became one of Burger King’s most successful social posts ever.

Total results:

• $42M+ in earned media

• 3.8B+ organic impressions

• 117K+ social mentions

• 734% increase in brand conversation

The tweet itself organically received:

• 422K+ likes

• 94K+ retweets

• 13K comments

The greatest result of all? The president went back and edited his tweet to correct the spelling error after the tweet had gone viral.