Three Twitter Fails from Big Businesses (and What We Can Learn from Them)

twitter-failIn the same way that we can all learn from big business success stories, there is just as much to be learned in their failures as well. And thanks to social media, many of those failures are very easy for the public to follow and take notes on.

On Twitter alone, there have been some pretty atrocious mistakes made by big business. Let’s see what we can learn from some of the biggest Twitter fails from big businesses.

McDonald’s Apparently Doesn’t Understand Hashtags

The lesson to this story is to fully understand how to use a tool before you implement it. They wanted to have people share their great stories about McDonald’s by urging users to use the hashtag #McDStories. This backfired pretty quickly as people starting sharing stories about food poisoning and terrible customer service. In the end, there were far more negative stories than positive ones.

Chrysler’s Social Media Guy Confuses Chrysler Account With Personal Account

The header alone should give you an idea what is to come.  This has actually happened many times over the years and employees have certainly had their hands slapped on occasion. But none have been as damaging as this one that was actually posted on Chrysler’s Twitter feed:  “I find it ironic that Detroit is known as the motor city and yet not one here knows how to fucking drive.” Yikes.

Bing Gets Insensitive When Promoting Its Twitter Account

While it was certainly noble of Bing to raise money for earthquake victims in Japan, thousands of people found it in bad taste that they were only offering the money based on re-tweets. They would pledge $1 for every re-tweet they got for their post. Essentially, people saw this as Bing using the deaths of thousands to promote their business.

Have you seen any cringe-worthy Twitter posts from big businesses? What were they and what can small business owners take away from such grave mistakes?

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