Failed in Social Media Marketing: Gap

Social media now has become the important place for marketing people. This is because social media such as Twitter, Instagram and YouTube now has a great number of users, which has strong influence power.  By using it appropriately, it can help to build up brand awareness and become welcome in a short period. However, if marketing people use it in a wrong way, it will hurt the brand image.

The example of failed social media marketing could be Gap in 2013. It is mainly because of the inappropriate content in social media. There was a hurricane Sandy in New York, which was the hot topic on twitter at that time. To catch up the train of hot topic, Gap put a twitter announced “There’s a Hurricane, Let’s Go To The Gap” which misleading customer in purchasing Gap products instead of doing something useful to face the horrible hurricane.

This twitter angered many customers, including some famous people who has a great number of followers. After retweeting by them, Gap made customers angered and they had to delete the twitter and apologized to customers to save the brand image.

To avoid the similar mistake in social media marketing, marketing people need to be honest to customers, choose the creative but also appropriate content to share. In addition, the inspection of shared information by a team in advance is also important. it can help to avoid the negative customers engagement such as retweet complain efficiently.

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