What You Should Learn From These Social Media Fails

We all love a viral video on social media but have you ever looked at when businesses are trending on social media for the wrong reasons? Let’s look at a few examples.

Social Media Fail Number One

Does anyone remember Susan Boyle? Singer from Britain’s Got Talent, she released an album in 2012 and had a party to celebrate it; can you guess the hashtag? 

#SusansAlbumParty let change the capital letters in this hashtag #SusAnalBumParty … I don’t I need to explain how hilarious and the “impact” this had on social media.

Social Media Fail Number Two

A Little bit of background information is needed to understand this fail. Research in Motion (RIM) is a Canadian tech company, they are the creators of Blackberry. They announced they were hiring 6000 new employees, which is great! Shame their hashtag wasn’t…

#RIMJobs really? It also didn’t help that newspapers started to use RIM Jobs to create some cheeky headlines themselves. Doubling the embarrassment for the company.

Social Media Fail Number Three

Mcdonalds just wanted to connect with their customers and share some memories and created a #McDStories which has no real bad connotation however the internet ruined it.

Just look at what they did which the hashtag into the book of fails.

Now we’ve all had a good old chuckle on how to not to use hashtags, here are some advice and tips to follow to avoid being the next social media fail:

1. Search on networks to see if your hashtag is already being used.
2. If you use a pre-existing hashtag, make sure you know what it means and do your research. For example, don’t use #Aurora to promote your new clothing range a day after 2012 Aurora cinema shooting, a company actually did this and it made them look really insensitive.
3. Always check the meaning of an acronym before using it. I recommend using Urban Dictionary to check that it doesn’t mean something rude in modern slang.
4. Make hashtags simple and relevant. Don’t use make it so complex that no one understands it(#ACIOASAIWL, A chain is only as strong as its weakest link).
5. When making a phrase into a hashtag always think for alternative interpretations of it. Capitalise the beginning of words to make it easier to interpret.
6. Run hashtag ideas by multiple people and see how they interpret it.

 

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