Why brand managers shouldn’t delete tweets

I get it. You were trying to be clever. You were trying to be relevant, and perhaps provide something unique that no one else has. It can be really hard getting attention amongst millions and billions of tweets.

You hit the tweet button thinking, “This will be it. Our followers will love this. They’ll love it so much that they’ll retweet it, and then we’ll go viral. Mashable, TechCrunch, Huffington Post and BuzzFeed will talk about it. Oh, it will be great.”

But then it’s not. People didn’t get your joke. They didn’t think it was funny and thought your tweet was out of line. They didn’t get the sentiment, and now they’re replying. They are retweeting, but for the wrong reasons. Your knee-jerk reaction is, “Let’s delete it.”

Like I said, I get it. You made a mistake. You don’t want this misunderstood or mistaken tweet to be part of your “official” Twitter record. Hit that trash can button and all will be forgotten. Let’s pretend like it never happened.

But it did happen, and it’s not forgotten—at least not for the time being. People are smart. They know you might delete it. They know you might regret it, so they strike the fatal blow. They take a screenshot of it. It lives.