Scheduling Promotional Tweets Ahead Is Convenient, Can Make You Look Like A Jerk

Companies try to entertain customers and prospective customers on social media by talking about their products, mentioning news relevant to their brand, and posting funny pictures that they hope people will share, like, and retweet. Maybe they should rethink all of this, though, and only use their pages for important news releases and coupon codes. This week’s cautionary tale: food-ordering site Seamless.

guacday

Monday, as it turns out, was National Guacamole Day. (No one sent you any avocados? What kinds of friends and family do you have?) Seamless celebrated this with a joking tweet about how important this is. On the most boring of news days, saying “nothing else matters” would have been silly. On a day when catastrophic floods in Colorado and a mass shooting in Washington, D.C. were in the news, it looked pretty heartless. How could they say such things? Were they trying to be funny and cheer people up with thoughts of green dip? Well… no.

Unlike other examples of Tweeting While Thoughtless, this wasn’t an intentional effort to be provocative or get media attention. The company claims that they had scheduled the tweet far in advance. That’s a good idea if you want content going out at regular intervals, but a bad idea if no one is peeking in at the post queue to make sure current events don’t render the upcoming posts offensive to anyone.

The company did apologize to some Twitter users who complained about the inappropriateness of the Tweet:

Whether they try to be ultra-topical or fail to notice the topics of the day, maybe brands just don’t need to tweet at all. Here are just a few examples from our archives:

10 Examples Of Why Companies Should Just Avoid Twitter Altogether
Eating Mini-Donuts Is Like Child Murder, Tweets Entenmann’s
Kenneth Cole Thinks Egyptian Turmoil Is Hilarious Way To Sell Clothes

Seamless has deleted the offending tweet, but it lives on in retweets and screenshots.

Seamless deletes ill-timed ‘nothing else matters’ tweet
[PR Daily]

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