It is no secret that many companies schedule messages as tweets in advance, which is of course very convenient. But why do many parties schedule these messages on whole hours? Bol.com, National Geographic and Comedy Central experienced the disadvantage during Remembrance Day, when they sent a tweet during the 2 minutes of silence.
Tweeting during Remembrance Day
During Remembrance Day last Saturday at eight o’clock in the evening, the entire country was silent. Unfortunately, a number of list to data large companies had forgotten to schedule tweets at exactly 20:00. No bad intentions of course, but it still comes across as annoying.After the two
I picked up my phone to see if I had any new notifications ( even though I already knew the answer from my Pebble ). Scrolling through my newsfeed, I noticed that Comedy Central had tweeted at exactly 8pm.
It was immediately obvious that it was an automated tweet, but the clumsiness of the message still struck me.
I closed my Twitter app thinking someone had to bite the bullet. And sure enough, not long after, the tweet was deleted and the clean email following ones took its place.
@ crishake @ vic23 That’s not really funny and wasn’t the intention. Our apologies!
— Comedy Central(@Comedycentralnl) May 4, 2013
Accidentally a tweet was sent out on our behalf at 8pm. This was of course not the intention, our apologies
— Comedy Central(@Comedycentralnl) May 4, 2013
All in all, it was of course a rather inappropriate mistake, but it does show that even when you segmentation of marketing efforts automate everything, you have to keep paying attention. Comedy Central was not the only one who accidentally left the Twitter bot running. National Geographic also tweeted through the silence: