Bitter Twitter experience for Habitat

24 Jun 09 - 5:08PM | Digital PR | Social Media | World Wide Web

Social media can be a powerful tool for business, but as with any form of advertising or promotion a company has to be careful how they go about it. Twitter, the micro-blogging site, has been embraced by many companies to great success as a way of engaging with a variety of stakeholders they might not normally be able to reach.

However, furniture store Habitat recently came under heavy criticism in some quarters for categorising their advertising Tweets with those discussing the Iranian election crisis. Getting Twitter and social media right can yield excellent results for a business, but getting it wrong can lead to a backlash from social media users, who are all potential customers. Read more on the Habitat story on BBC News.

We'd like to hear your views on this. Do you think this will harm Habitat’s reputation, or is it just an over-reaction from some Twitter users?

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So they were basically using the top ten most popular hashtags and just pasting them into their tweets in order to rise up the rankings. Very spammy tactics there.. I'd imagine this would annoy Twitter users in general since too much use of this type of technique and Twitter just becomes awash with Spam posts - making genuine use of it very difficult for things such as discussing the Iranian elections. Other companies will no doubt use this kind of tactic and spam like heck anyway, but would expect more from a brand like Habitat really.

Posted by: Gareth Jenkins, Date 24 June 2009, 04:49PM

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