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Twitter Wins
October 5, 2021
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I almost went there, but our All Access Senior Editor, Phyllis Stark, beat me to it. And I couldn’t have made a better point. “Where was radio during Facebook, IG and WhatsApp’s epic fail on Monday?” What an opportunity to capitalize and monopolize on both a traditional and digital audience while the world’s lifelines were “offline.”
While most of us were freaking out, bitching to our co-workers and friends about the epic incident, throwing our phones against the wall, or turning the wi-fi on and off again, only one entity was taking advantage of the situation, Twitter. Phyllis sums it up perfectly in “The Bigger Picture” this week. This is the way we should all be thinking in times like these. (This article originally appeared in All Access Nashville’s “Net News” & “Country Daily” on 10/5).
When Facebook And Instagram Were Down, Twitter Turned Up The Funny
By Guest Columnist/All Access Senior Editor Phyllis Stark
During the nearly daylong FACEBOOK, INSTAGRAM and WHATSAPP outage YESTERDAY (10/4), the Twitterverse did what it does best -- be topical, timely and hilarious. The results offer some compelling ideas for how social media managers for radio stations can do the same when faced with a news event seemingly everyone is talking about.
The fun started during the outage when TWITTER's own official account cheekily posted this simple message, "Hello literally everyone," a nod to the heavy traffic the platform was getting when other options became unavailable. Through the remainder of the day, dozens of other brands joined the thread, responding to TWITTER's welcome with varying degrees of wit, cleverness and calculated pitching for their own products and services. Even the band METALLICA and singers ADELE and RICKY MARTIN jumped on board.
Some brands' tweets fell flat, others were laugh out loud funny. But by the next day, TWITTER's original post had more than 590,000 retweets and 3.2 million likes.
McDONALDS was among the first to respond, tweeting, "hi what can i get you," to which TWITTER responded "59.6 million nuggets for my friends." McDONALDS CANADA asked, "how r u handling the fame?"
ZOOM wrote, "Hi, can everyone see my screen?" When another TWITTER user shot back, "You came late. Party's over," ZOOM replied, "Our last meeting ran over, sorry." YAHOO simply wrote, "boop."
Job search site INDEED asked, "Who spent the day scrolling jobs instead of social media?" to which one TWITTER user hilariously replied, "Influencers."
Home improvement store LOWE'S wrote, "INSTAGRAM and FACEBOOK are down? Seems like a great time for you to get off your phone and do some good old-fashioned yardwork," then signed the tweet from "Your dad, probably." AUTOZONE tweeted, "Now is a good time to go check-in on your check engine light."
One of the more cringeworthy (yet funny) posts came from the TAMPAX brand, which wrote, "TWTTER? Guess we'll insert ourselves right here."
KFC, MICRSOFT TEAMS, ALEXA, the NFL, STARBUCKS, T-MOBILE, ROBINHOOD, BURGER KING, DREAMWORKS ANIMATION, ROYAL CARRIBEAN, BUDWEISER, ADIDAS, RED ROBIN, KRAFT, SAMSUNG, IHOP, OREO, SUBARU, PEPSI, PLANET FITNESS and PIZZA HUT were among the many other brands weighing in, with some clever interactions not only with TWITTER, but with each other. When the TWIX candy bar brand wrote "hello," computer company DELL replied, "Did the right or left TWIX tweet this?" When OSCAR MEYER told TWITTER, "You were made for this moment," TWITTER quickly asked for the "keys to the hot dog car." LYFT replied, "We're happy to drive."
But for our purposes, radio won the day. Classic Hits CJOT (BOOM 99.7)/OTTAWA, ON appears to have been the only radio station to enter the fray, writing, "Just here so our boss doesn't ask us why we're the only brand on TWITTER not in this thread."
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