The secret sauce behind Taco Bell’s sustained social engagement

Sponsored by

Caliber is reimagining how stories are created, shared, and valued by meeting audiences on their terms, in their tone, and on their time.

Using insights from its own success on social media, Caliber simplifies social to move brands forward—making work that works.

This story is the latest in a series exploring how brands craft standout social media strategies. If you’d like to chat about how your brand is approaching social, Katie Hicks wants to hear about it. Reach out to her at hicks@morningbrew.com.

Taco Bell has been going viral for more than a decade—and there’s más where that came from.

The fast-food brand has made its mark on the internet with quippy posts, unexpected collabs, and social-first events like the annual Live Más Live, where new menu items are announced as if they’re the latest tech innovation.

Nicole Weltman, head of social and PR for Taco Bell, told us she was a fan of the brand long before joining the team nearly four years ago. During her tenure, she said, Taco Bell has focused on sharpening its brand voice and its social strategies as it has continued to grow an international presence alongside its online presence. Taco Bell now has 4 million followers on TikTok, 1.9 million on Instagram, and 1.8 million on X.

Earlier this month, Taco Bell’s parent company, Yum Brands, reported that Taco Bell saw same-store sales lift 7% in Q3 at a time when many other fast-food chains are struggling. Yum Brands CEO Christopher Turner said on the earnings call that he attributed the brand’s performance to “innovation, distinctive value offerings, and digital engagement.”

The secret sauce to that digital engagement isn’t diablo or spicy ranch, but rather a sustained commitment to listening to and delivering on what customers want.

“We put the brand in the hands of our fans,” Weltman said.

Something to taco-bout

For Taco Bell, social is central to every campaign, regardless of its message, Weltman said. That means the brand’s social content is created custom for each platform, instead of trimming down TV ads or other assets to use as vertical video.

“We don’t do cut-downs,” she said. “Everything is specifically made bespoke for social, which is a huge win during my tenure.”

There are plenty of hands on deck to do it. Creative campaigns are typically handled with agencies Deutsch and Biite, while more reactive, day-to-day social posting about things like queso soup or the northern lights are handled by Taco Bell’s in-house, nine-person team.

Some social directives come from above as part of larger brand priorities, like Taco Bell’s big chicken push this year, but Weltman said social ideas sometimes inform larger brand campaigns, too. This year’s Super Bowl campaign, for instance, featured photo booth–style snapshots of Taco Bell customers at drive-thrus around the country.

“When we think of our fans, we think of ‘What are the photos and the content that they’re tagging us in from a UGC perspective? How does that inform what we want to do?’” Weltman said. “Our Super Bowl campaign came from the insight that we get tagged in really fun drive-thru content.”

UGC, it seems, can be a gold mine for Taco Bell: Weltman said one of the brand’s top-performing posts this year used the “I’m a mommy” meme from Love Island USA and showed a bag of Taco Bell buckled up in a car, which was inspired by tagged fan posts of orders being transported the same way.

Stop, look, and listen

Whether it’s reacting to the Baja Blast Pie released earlier this month or sharing wedding pictures from the Taco Bell Cantina in Vegas, Taco Bell fans post about the brand round the clock, and Weltman said her team regularly gleans insights from organic social content through social listening.

“The comment section is a brief,” she said.

However, it’s not just about text-based insights. There’s a “richness to video social listening” that shouldn’t be ignored, Weltman stressed, although she noted that it may take a few different tools to do it well.

To help round out insights, Taco Bell also solicits feedback directly from creators and brand fan pages on new menu items and campaigns, and will in turn foster those relationships by sending gifts or inviting creators to events. Some creators get an even bigger stage: Gabby Windey, a creator and reality TV star, was tapped for a chicken-tender social campaign, which ended up extending into a TV spot.

“We want to make sure that people are getting from us in the relationship—that we’re giving just as much as we’re receiving,” Weltman said. “At the same time, we constantly want to mix in new voices, up-and-coming voices, diversify our reach.”

Even though the brand boasts a cross-platform follower count in the multimillions, Weltman said she looks at shares as the most valuable social metric. Because Taco Bell switches its menu every four weeks, some people might follow just to see what it might put out next, she said.

“I try to preach that followers is just one metric and not necessarily indicative of engagement,” she said. “We look at shares because to us, that means that we hit our goal of resonating with the fans.”

This summer, Taco Bell unveiled its “Fan Style” campaign, which allows customers to share their customized orders online and earn loyalty points each time their creation is ordered. In a few weeks, Weltman said, three of the top creations will be added to Taco Bell’s official menu, showing fans that their engagement with the brand does not go unnoticed.

“We want people to feel seen in the content that we make, and that creates a symbiotic relationship with the community,” Weltman said. “If they feel seen in our content, they’re more likely to share it, and that’s really important to us, because that’s a cosign. That’s now your friend advocating for Taco Bell.”