Twitter Gaffes…Beware of Autotweeting and Scheduled Tweets!
October 15th, 2013 • COMM464, EMarketing
How a company inadvertently ends up committing a social media gaffe when attempting to navigate through social media is always humorous and no so infrequent as people think it may be. With brands able to autotweet their messages, there have been many gaffes in the past. These are some popular gaffes that have been sourced from Buzzfeed.
Yesterday, Twitter announced on its blog that marketers can now schedule their tweets up to a year in advance if they use the company’s ad product! While this can help the company in planning its complex ad campaigns months in advance, as detailed above, there could be serious repercussions too.
Autotweets can turn out to be the bane of people’s lives too, not just those of brands. As a marketing and PR enthusiast, I love listening to Guy Kawasaki talk and recently, he was in the news for failing to shut off his regular stream of autotweets in the midst of the Boston Marathon tragedy. In fact, many people criticised him for trying to “hawk his wares” when the nation is dealing with a tragedy.
But this was the story of 1 prominent person. What if this was a company, large or small, who had an active twitter base? Any errors in this realm can not only quickly reduce the precious follower count but also create a lot of negative press.
Also, scheduling many tweets, all advertorial in nature, can put off your audience who is looking to strike a conversation with you. They can unfollow you or worse, collapse your feed! Often ignored as a concept, collapsing a feed from a specific follower allows you to avoid seeing their posts unless you want to see them specifically. Also, autotweets could be seen as impersonal, unauthentic and unengaging- three words that could mean great harm to your brand!