Think before You Tweet: Lessons from UK

Survey conducted by Online Spy Shop tells us that about half of the Twitter users of the UK dug out their previous tweets to edit them!
Among the men who did so, the prime reason was that they were embarrassed to stand by what they had tweeted months or even years back. Among the women, the main cause of editing their previous tweets was a change of opinion. They felt that they cannot stand by their earlier opinions anymore and needed to edit them, having growing wiser with time.

The problem of tweeting personal opinion on controversial topics, or even the more trending matters of the day, is that you generally think very lightly or cursorily about it. Later on, months or years down the line, your perspective becomes clearer or changes with your experience and expanding knowledge base. Then, these tweets come across as major turn-offs because you end up taking a stand that is totally contrary to what you had tweeted about earlier.

Celebrities are more likely to edit their previous tweets, as seen from the survey we are talking about here. Musicians and politicians were the more common ones who felt that they were not comfortable anymore with their past tweets. In fact, there was a spike in Google’s traffic that led to pages guiding users to edit previous tweets!

From a marketing perspective as well, Twitter is a fantastic tool but what you write and publish, stays there! As the voice of a brand, you need to be very careful about what you are tweeting as these tweets can be used later on to take digs at your brand. Digital marketers can learn some lessons from these celebs of UK who are digging up old tweets to salvage their present reputation.