McDonald’s Botches Black Friday; Recovers With Style

Social media moves fast. You need a good strategy, but also countless cute/clever/funny/helpful/interesting pieces of content day in and day out to make it work. If you are doing it regularly, you are going to occasionally make mistakes.

The majority of the time, you will notice your error before anyone else does and you can delete your tweet or edit your post. Sometimes though, the only option is a response.

In preparation for Black Friday, McDonald’s sent the following tweet into the world:

WHOOOOOOOOOPS!

This wasn’t a typo or someone hitting send too fast. This was someone copy and pasting a note from an internal document, throwing it into Twitter or a third party scheduler, and letting it fly.

They didn’t even wait until Black Friday to send it — the tweet went live on Thanksgiving.

Now if you run a small business or manage your band or nonprofit’s social media account, you could simply delete this tweet. If you’re a behemoth like McDonald’s, not so much.

You do have a few options though. You can:

1. Apologize.
2. Call the FBI and claim your account has been hacked. 
3. Blame an intern or member of your staff. 
4. Respond with something awesome!

​McDonald’s went with option four, tweeting this the following morning:

While the follow up tweet didn’t get nearly as many retweets or likes as the original tweet, it did appease the internet, which is always hungry for a social media scandal.

You need look no further than the responses to see that the follow up fully appeased the Twitterverse. This time.

But user beware: if you or your team require coffee to start the day, then by all means, have it on hand! If you are McDonald’s that really shouldn’t be a problem. 🙄 🙄 🙄