Brands are better served differentiating themselves in social media by ensuring their social media copy is less fortune cookie copy; more sharp, conversational copywriting.

A quick scroll of the Coca-Cola tweet stream, reveals they are sparing with broadcast tweets (the tweets blasting to all 175K-plus @CocaCola followers). This strategy, in theory, provides more bang for the tweet when they do blast a tweet to the masses and ensures less chance of follower fatigue, albeit with lower visibility (a double-edged sword for many brands, but not necessarily for one as ubiquitous as Coke). Knowing this, it’s more than probable that the following recent tweet was fairly-to-very premeditated:

That folks, is a tweet dropping in on you as an unpaid ad that reads like a fortune cookie. It blasts the followers and latches onto a larger #happiness conversation/trending topic within twitter. If done well, it works. And as seen here, if done just okay, it also works. Within minutes the fortune Coke-ie had more than 70 retweets:

I don’t mean to be a crank about this and I really don’t mean to single Coke out as the only occasional corporate misguided tweeter—they’re certainly not alone and, by most accounts, are way ahead of the social curve. I’m sure in my days at Dunkin’ Donuts’ social helm, I may have missed on one or two gems. Okay, I did. Maybe even three times. I just happened to see this particular Coca-Cola tweet in my own feed and grabbed it as an example of something we see a lot. I can, because Coke put it out there for scrutiny. Brands don’t bat a thousand in social media, just as they don’t in traditional advertising, public relations, and everything else they do.

All I’m saying (in too many words perhaps)—when a brand decides to tweet all its followers, the brand should sound like itself, not like a fortune cookie.

Cross-posted on usblog.havasdigital.com