Customer buys promoted tweet to complain about British Airways

Companies may have a new form of online brand bashing to contend with: The kind customers are mad enough to pay for.

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Whatever that breaking point is, Chicago businessman Hasan Syed reached it. He paid to promote a tweet in the New York and United Kingdom markets to urge people, “Don’t fly @BritishAirways. Their customer service is horrendous.”

Promoting a tweet makes it more visible by targeting certain keywords or types of users. The cost of a promoted tweet is generally determined by how many people interact with that tweet; buyers set their own advertising budgets.

Syed tweeted the results of his campaign: He spent $1,000 and earned a little over 73,000 impressions.

“I thought maybe it might be interesting to see how promoted tweets might work and if that would get anyone’s attention,” he told Time‘s Moneyland blog.

Syed told The Guardian that he was ticked about the airline’s handling of his father’s lost luggage.

JetBlue marketer Marty St. George had this to say about it:

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