This morning, I attended a Social Media Club of Kansas City breakfast with Jenna Bromberg (@jennabrom), head of social and digital engagement at Pizza Hut. Jenna shared the journey of Pizza Hut’s recent rebrand, along with the challenges and opportunities social media brought to the rebranding strategy.

This has been most people’s perception of Pizza Hut:

The inventors of Stuffed Crust, Book It club, the big red cups for soda and the best place for millennials to eat in the 90’s. Over the past year, Pizza Hut has changed this outdated image to its new goal: bringing premium flavor to delivery pizza. The pizza looks completely different, along with the company’s marketing and advertising content.

Jenna and her team were challenged with the goal of telling the world that the pizza has changed, while still maintaining relevance with millennial families (one of the company’s main segments of customers). Their #1 goal was to sell pizza, while also generating immediate millennial reengagement.

With 40 percent of Pizza Hut’s orders now coming from online, Pizza Hut’s customers are not the only aspect that has evolved. Jenna hired four big thinkers to complete her digital team. A customer service team, who answers every single Tweet directed at Pizza Hut, also backs up Jenna and her hires. During high traffic times and events, all hands are on deck engaging with their audience. Their motto is, ‘Everyone who can eat pizza is a potential customer’.

With several strong campaigns, hard work, and even a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Pizza Thrower, Jenna’s team successfully helped Pizza Hut spread the word that #PizzaHasChanged. But how do they keep the momentum going now that the big rebranding news isn’t really news anymore? The answer is in Jenna’s Golden Rules of Content Creation. Whether you are a large company like Pizza Hut or a smaller one-store retailer, these rules are important to always keep in mind when posting to social media.

Jenna’s Golden Rules of Content Creation:

1. Who cares? Always determine whom you are talking to and if the content is relatable, inspirational or entertaining. If it’s not, then create something else.
2. Take 3 small bets before you take a huge risk. The possibilities of marketing on social media are limitless. But before you take a huge risk and spend a lot of money, test the waters with your audience. See what works and what flops.
3. Leave the content creation to the people who know the brand the best. Sometimes that’s you. Sometimes it’s not. Trust your internal team first and see what they have to say.
4. Never walk away without a key insight. Look at how every piece of content resonated with your audience and learn something from it.

Another key takeaway that Jenna added was the fact that you don’t have to be everywhere. Social media is a BIG world and not every channel will fit your brand. For example, Pizza Hut is not on Snapchat, and that’s okay. Snapchat doesn’t provide the analytics that other social channels do and the channel doesn’t necessarily make sense for the Pizza Hut brand. On the other hand, Pizza Hut has had success with reaching out to YouTube celebrities, which wouldn’t necessarily work for others.

Jenna and her team prove that knowing and listening to your audience is essential. By engaging with their social media audience (even when they don’t ask for it) they can gain customers and increase sales.

They can also fix potential problems. For example, when Pizza Hut’s pretzel crust was introduced, much of the feedback on Twitter told Jenna’s team that the crust was too salty. Pizza Hut refined the recipe and is seeing a much more positive sentiment towards the crust. In fact, much of the company’s new menu comes from people on social media asking and suggesting new ideas. Now, there are more than 2 billion different pizza combinations you can order at Pizza Hut! Time to get started…