Yet Another Promoted Trend Gone Wrong – #GetAwayWithItAndWin

I hate to become a broken record, but yesterday yet another promoted trend on Twitter went awry. Promoted trends, one of Twitter’s marketing and advertising solutions, were launched to help brands own a hashtag on Twitter for a day. The company recommends brands to use them during a blitz or sales push, and as such they’ve become quite popular. However, many of the engagements Twitter users have had with the promoted hashtags aren’t necessarily brand positive. I try to stay on top of promoted trends, and I’ve actually covered multiple cases were user interaction has actually been negative.

This time, the promoted trend was for JetBlue, promoting a “live” show where users could win a trip getaway with the hashtag #GetAwayWithItAndWin. As you can see below, many of the responses to the hashtag weren’t positive and weren’t even in the right context of the content:

Being a social media advocate, I’d love to be able to say promoted trends are a great way to reach and engage users. However, I also want to be able to recommend things that work for brands, and I can’t with promoted trends. Though it can provide great exposure, since the hashtags aren’t within the context of the brand, many users either don’t care that it’s promoting a brand or do and have negative things to say. Let’s be real- are the above tweets really helping JetBlue reach their end goal- sales? Probably not.

– Bryan Nagy