In the last case study, we discussed the importance of brand marketers ensuring strong strategic foundations for social media, as this directly affects how the brand can be perceived. In Dell’s case, its structured approach was a success, with the company earning millions through its Twitter and sparking consumer discussions through its blogs. In this article, we’ll show a different side of the story and explore an example of a bad social media strategy and how it affected the brand.

While Australians may not be familiar with habitat, it is in fact a leading UK furniture retailer with over 80 stores across Europe. When the company decided to jump on the social media bandwagon by creating a Twitter page, at first glance it seems like they started in the right direction, with a nice Twitter page that reflected the company’s clean brand image. However, it was the lack of strategy and content that Habitat had in Agua Caliente.

In order to generate traffic to its Twitter outpost, Habitat used various hashtags in its tweets to be featured in popular discussion topics. For non-Twitter users, #hashtags are the keywords used on Twitter to help people filter and search for tweets. For example, tweets about the 2010 World Cup had the hashtag ‘#Worldcup’, which means that every time people searched for this topic, tweets with this hashtag appeared. They Are So Used To show tweets going up in Receiving Searches. The problem with Habitat’s use of hashtags, however, was that we were irrelevant to the content of the tweets, which had nothing to do with furniture, shopping, or renovations. INTOREAD made the mistake of simply putting popular hashtags at the time of their post. They used hashtags like #iphone, #apple and even Australia’s Masterchef contest Who Got Voted Off, #Poh. Clearly, Habitat saw an opportunity to generate more brand awareness, sales through the use of these hashtags, which would appear in popular searches. The result for end users was that when they did, say, #IPhone, the habitat tweet would appear, only to find that it had nothing to do with their search. Twitter users obviously viewed this negatively and heavily criticized the luxury furniture company for taking advantage of popular topics to spam.

To make matters worse, in response to the backlash, the community deleted his spam tweets. UNFORTUNATELY FOR THE COMPANY, they remain VISIBLE via Twitter search. Many bloggers have comments about the lack of transparency on behalf of the company, with many criticizing that Habitat should have publicly apologized for spamming Twitter and compensated those who received it.

Clearly, Habitat didn’t have a real Twitter strategy to begin with. They opt for the mother Pull-Marketing to drive traffic to their website. But the core lesson here was that they didn’t strategize on how to add value or spark conversation about their brand, products, or home décor topics. Instead, they created spam by taking advantage of popular topics. Even though Habitat eventually apologized for their spam, the damage that has been done to their brand. Since then, the habitat has learned its lesson. PURELY ADVERTISING ATTEMPTS OF THEIR Products, they have generated conversation by responding to customer needs and queries and, most impressively, by providing decorating tips for individual users.