Do People Really Want McDonald’s Onion Rings? | TikTok AI

Can brands leverage TikTok analytics and know what new product offerings they should invest in? Can consumers influence a brand to create something new via TikTok for business? More importantly, can we get the onion rings we’ve been wanting for so long at our favourite McDonald’s!

Apparently, yes. If a good many of us on TikTok tell McDonald’s that that’s what we want, they might just start making onion rings. After all, every brand needs to heed the voice of the customer (VoC).

TikTok For Business - Does It Really Work?

TikTok, for all practical purposes, is the most happening place right now for brand marketing. You can get very interesting and valuable consumer insights through sentiment mining of TikTok videos with video AI. Brands need to leverage this precious qualitative TikTok video data and not just rely on numerical data from TikTok analytics if they want to significantly catapult their brand value and image.

Circling back to how we realized what McDonald’s consumers wanted on the menu. There was just so much buzz around the TikTok video created by graphic designer Emily Zugay @emilyzugay, that it piqued our interest. We thought it would be a fun little project to see what insights we could find from the video itself and the comments people had posted on it. This would also give us another opportunity to assess if TikTok for business is as sound a marketing strategy for brands as it seems, especially considering that it’s a fairly new social media platform.

Being specialized in sentiment analysis and text analytics for over a decade, especially in AI-based video content analysis, we were even more excited to assess the video after McDonald’s themselves changed their logo temporarily on their social channel, in jest.

Brands like McDonald’s are begging one TikTok star to revamp their logos | PR Week

Getting Down To the Brass Tacks

We signed into Repustate IQ to datamine this particular TikTok video. We created a new project to hold all the mined data and used the Repustate Restaurant Aspect Model because we needed the platform to calculate the sentiment in the context of a restaurant. Then we chose TikTok to fetch the data from the video (you can choose any data source including Douyin, YouTube, Google Reviews, Amazon Product Reviews, Twitter, etc.) Also, you have the option to choose a particular video or a hashtag, and it will pull all the videos linked to the hashtag as well as their comments.

Now, the fun part! Around 4000 comments were mined from the video. We saw that there were some really interesting things that people had to say about the new logo Emily had joked about. The platform pulled everything together into aspects and categories, and analysed sentiment from each one. It gave a general overview, first, of the negative, positive, and neutral emotions (see figure 1 below). And then a more detailed one.

When we went deeper into the analysis, we saw that the platform picked up all the words occurring most often and assigned them as entities. So we got sentiment analysis on entities like “knees”, “onion rings”, “love”, etc. The platform also gave us sentiment by classification such as “organization”, “health”, “person”, etc. (See figure 2 below).

Understandably, there was a lot of information to go through, but what we noticed the most were certain comments where consumers actually asked for onion rings! There was much confusion, as well as anticipation if McDonald’s would indeed be putting onion rings on its menu any time soon. The icing, of course, was when McDonald’s returned the joke by actually using the logo on its social channel temporarily.

Watch the analysis in action

TikTok For Business - A Two-Way Street

What this analysis showed us is that TikTok for business is a two-way street. Not only can brands use it to introduce new product offerings or gauge if there is a need for a new product, but they can also mine key data on consumer experience and know market expectations.

If McDonald’s could change its logo, even if in jest, it’s showing the world that, as a brand, it’s listening to its consumers and acknowledging what they’re saying. So in our books, they’re already checking all the right boxes.

Learn more about how to use TikTok Analytics within your profile.

How Does TikTok Video Sentiment Analysis Translate Into A Brand Action-Plan?

If one had to get data-driven consumer insights from a sentiment analysis dashboard, to know how a brand could influence the market, and vice versa, this would be it. The way this viral video has got the whole internet abuzz tells you how easy it is for brands to use social media to not only understand market sentiment but also use TikTok for brand amplification.

The Human Element - Going Beyond Numerical Data

So why don’t regular TikTok analytics platforms not give brands these deep consumer insights? That’s because most TikTok analytics platforms give you dry metrics - the total number of likes, shares, posts, the video watch-time, and numerical data like these. But what it does not give is the human element like if there has been a negative mention, what it is really about. Or, an analysis of the many different user personas that want the same thing but for different reasons. These are granular insights that numbers don’t give you because there are no action-based findings based on depth.

When using TikTok for business and looking at numerical data, marketing teams should ask themselves, what the reasons behind those numbers are. Questions like:

• What are the most common sentiments expressed overall?

• What are common among the consumers who shared or liked your video?

• What are the common aspects amongst people who shared different videos apart from the brand’s content, but used the same hashtags?

• What is the sentiment behind each comment? What are the different topics that the video lead to in the discussions?

This is the true information worth seeking. A brand can only truly understand the effect of its digital marketing and genuine consumer experience insights when it has sentiment data in conjunction with the numbers that TikTok analytics gives.

Learn more: TikTok for Business Beyond Ads & Analytics

How Did We Mine Consumer Sentiments Using TikTok Video Analytics With AI?

Here is a quick behind-the-curtain look at how Repustate IQ mined sentiment from the video.

Step 1 - Data Mining

Repustate IQ collected the mined data from the TikTok video when we chose TikTok as the source and input the particular video link.

Step 2 - Data Processing

The platform’s video content analysis capability extracted the video content using several tasks:

• Audio transcription - The audio from the video was transcribed through speech-to-text software. (This is the same process whether it’s a TikTok for business video or a podcast)

• Caption overlay - All captions in the video were extracted and segregated into different categories based on topics

• Image overlay - All images were extracted and captured through optical character recognition (OCR)

• Logo recognition - The logo in the background was recognized and extracted

• Text extraction- All comments, hashtags, and emojis were extracted from the video and its comments.

Step 3 - Data Analysis

The platform analyzed the data for languages, aspects, and topics like food, knees, or onion rings, in this case. It also scrutinized and calculated the sentiment expressed in the video, overall, as well as in individual comments. The insights from this TikTok data analytics were thus holistic, comprising both quantitative as well as qualitative data.

Step 4 - Data Visualization

Ultimately, all the insights were presented on the sentiment analysis dashboard with a number of permutations and combinations where we could see sentiment for each aspect like “healthy”, “tasty”, “logo”, “onion rings”, etc. It is in this part of the process, where a brand can find all the insights it is looking for in using TikTok for business growth.

Discover More: TikTok Social Listening

Bread or Cake?

Social media can be a fun place, and a gold mine for brands to extract really useful information from about what’s going on in their consumers’ minds. Last year, similar to TikTok analytics, we did another cool analysis on a hot debate on Twitter. Read “Are Subway sandwiches made from cake?” It all started when someone commented how considering the amount of sugar in their bread, subway sandwiches were essentially made from cake.

There were some pretty clever discoveries we made in that project too. But now that we’ve all got hooked onto TikTok, which honestly, is everyone’s guilty pleasure, look out for more fun TikTok video projects with audience insights from us.