The fast food industry is an early adopter and heavy investor in social media marketing – so marketers can learn a lot by studying the social leaders in the fast food industry. Track Social’s Fast Food Zone tracks the year-round social performance of fast food chains, and in this article, we take a look at which chains are currently performing best on social media.

To rank fast food chains, Track Social employed the Track Social Overall Performance metric, which combines data from the four major social platforms (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn) based on all activity by brands, all responses from users, as well as general chatter levels in social media.

So here are the “Top Fast Food Chains on Social Media” and how they made the list:

The world’s biggest fast food chain leads the way on social media, with large presences across all platforms. With a huge Facebook Audience of 27 million fans and almost 1 million followers on Twitter, McDonald’s leverages its notoriety to generate lots of social buzz.

Subway is close behind McDonald’s on most metrics, and is leading the chase for 1,000,000 Twitter followers. Subway also leads the Fast Food category in Social Presence, which is a measure of content production across channels. If content is king, then consistent content is a king that wins.

Taco Bell is the Engagement leader among fast food chains, drawing high response levels to its “outside-the-burger” content. For example, a recent Facebook teaser post for an upcoming variation of the Doritos Taco drew over 90,000 Likes.

America runs on Dunkin’, and the coffee/donut house gets a significant amount of fuel back from America through social media. Dunkin’ is especially strong on Facebook where its “DD”-themed posts achieve consistently high response levels from a large inbuilt audience.

Showing that a little philosophical controversy doesn’t necessarily hurt business, the rapidly expanding chicken-themed franchise is building a formidable presence in the social sphere.

Now for those chains that were just short of making our Top 5:

6. Burger King
7. KFC
8. Krispy Kreme
9. Dairy Queen
10. Wendy’s

Check out the full list at Track Social’s Fast Food Zone!

Track Social, the leading social media analytics platform and consultancy, offers extensive social monitoring and reporting solutions for small businesses and enterprise clients.