Here’s a rather curious case of public relations. Habitat, the UK furniture shop, has been spotted abusing popular Twitter search terms in order to get their products and offers seen by more people.

The company’s social media arm has been hashtagging their tweets on sales and promotions with #mousavi and #iPhone amongst others and is now being seriously frowned upon for taking advantage of the situation in Iran as well as misleading Twitter users in general.

Habitat has since deleted their tweets such as #iPhone Our totally desirable Spring collection now has 20% off!www.habitat.co.uk/pws/Home.ice and #MOUSAVI Join the database for free to win a £1000 gift card http://bit.ly/2wPLO (expand) ? Now!! but you can still see them here.

The incident’s being cited as how not to use social media but then, here I am writing about and I wouldn’t have known about their £1,000 gift card. Will more people remember this transgression than’ll sign up to their database and spend money in their sale?

Not a trick Habitat can or would repeat twice but an interesting way of spamming Twitter in general. I wonder how long until ViAgRA salesmen start doing the same?

Brand Republic