Companies Should Watch What They Tweet

Twitter’s dope. It’s a great social media platform. You can customize your timeline to get the exact content you want. Unlike Facebook, Twitter doesn’t come with obligatory friends or follows. You sat one desk over from a guy for the first half of third grade. On Facebook: you’re keeping up with his family trip to Branson. On Twitter: What guy? Who cares? You owe him NOTHING. Furthermore, your mom isn’t on Twitter (sorry Susanne), so your edgy views on parking meter attendants can fly uncensored. You can “like” the fan page of a celebrity/athlete/comedian on Facebook, but Twitter gives you a direct line from the person’s brain. If you’re not enjoying your tweeting experience, you’re not discriminating enough when it comes to who you follow. You have total control over your timeline. Or at least that’s how it started.

Now though, corporate Twitter accounts have begun to invade the airspace once occupied only by open discussion. “Sponsored” or “promoted” tweets appear at the top of my timeline with greater frequency each day. It makes sense from a business perspective. Twitter is a free service, and the makers of any web platform must find a way to monazite the thing. After all, Domino’s Pizza deserves just as much room to say its piece as a six-year-old One Direction fan. And really, an add about 2-topping medium pizzas is less offensive than a racist tweet from some Internet troll. But I choose to follow neither of those accounts because I am uninterested by both of them. The difference is, I can’t escape Domino’s. They keep coming back.

This may seem harmless enough, but companies often walk a fine line on Twitter. By participating in trends and hashtags, businesses theoretically stay relevant and engage with their constituents. However, when businesses capitalize on the emotion elicited by national or global events, they attempt to repurpose feelings into buzz. Gross. Both Campbell’s Soup and AT&T were guilty of infamous tweets related to Pearl Harbor and 9/11 respectively.

The good news is that because Twitter is a free marketplace, the audience can react. In both the SpaghettiOs and AT&T cases, backlash forced the tweets to be deleted. Companies should feel welcome to engage consumers online. They can tweet all they want to their followers, and I guess I can deal with the occasional promoted tweet. However, co-signing the emotional response to a tragedy is off-limits.