Did McDonald’s stage their Black Friday Twitter slip-up or are they just ‘lovin’ it’?

Uh-oh?

A verified Twitter account for the McDonald’s Corporation ordered up a scheduled tweet, but got a side of facepalm Friday morning when instead of promoting whatever special they intended, their placeholder tweet went viral.

“Black Friday **** Need copy and link****,” the tweet read. By 8 a.m. it had been retweeted nearly 8,800 times and liked more than 17,500 times.

That’s right, it was still live eight hours after it was sent, at the stroke of midnight on Black Friday, a day known more for sleeping and shopping than Big Macs. The organic social media impressions the burger giant gained with their mistake far outpaced the reach and impact of the everyday Twitter promo. So, good job, social media team?

Indeed, the three most recent original tweets from the @McDonaldsCorp account received seven, two and 13 retweets respectively, so, on pure numbers, the lapse paid off.

The account previously mentioned a forthcoming promotion using the hashtag #BlackFryDay, a play mish-mashing the shopping pseudo-holiday with the chain’s unending effort to get us addicted to its fries. It remained unclear whether the incomplete tweet was part of that promotion.

When a scheduled tweet goes wrong in the high stakes world of corporate social media, it’s often followed by an apology and sometimes a firing. But this time McDonald’s chose to ride the unanticipated momentum of the moment, and at 8:48 a.m., the account tweeted this follow-up:

Bravo.

Because on this Black Friday, we ****need copy and link****, too.

And thus began the latest burger Twitter war, as later Friday, Wendy’s fired a tweet across McDonald’s bow.

The @MCDonaldsCorp Twitter account is not the main, customer-facing one for the fast food chain. That is @McDonalds, which has nearly 3.5 million followers. @McDonaldsCorp (164,000 followers) is the Twitter presence for the company’s corporate arm, the same account that in March tweeted and quickly deleted the following to @realDonaldTrump: “You are actually a disgusting excuse of a President and we would love to have @BarackObama back, also you have tiny hands.”

This story was originally published November 24, 2017 at 7:23 AM with the headline "Did McDonald’s stage their Black Friday Twitter slip-up or are they just ‘lovin’ it’?."