In case you didn’t know… the Burger King Twitter account was hacked for a few hours today but their crisis teams cracked the whip and the account was finally suspended moment ago. Let’s talk hacking huh? No one’s protected these days.
Per Gothamist, “Burger King is now “McDonald’s,” sports avatars of the golden arches, and is tweeting stock photos of people shooting drugs into their veins.”
See some of the hacked tweets here.
The larger question floating around is that with McDonald’s being the big man in the fast food world, who even talks about Burger King? Did this hack actually help?
When Mashable took a screen grab they were at ~80K followers, when Gothamist took the screen grab they were at ~97K and when I took it (see above) they were at ~105K; that’s a big uptake in a matter of an hour.
What does this teach us social media/digital professionals? You BETTER have a crisis communications plan in place before something like this happens! In the meantime, here are some easy ways to protect your account from being hacked via Social Media Today.
Step one in your strategy within your crisis communication plan should be to,
“Issue a statement immediately from your other social media accounts, and from the hacked account if possible. Within this statement:
- Apologize for the incident and any offense it may have caused to your fans and followers
- Let them know that you’re in the process of looking into the incident
- Give them links to other platforms that they can follow you on for news and updates”
We’re dying to know BK… what happened?
I’m against hacking a Twitter account or any account at all, but I must admit that it’s a bit funny. Anyway, aren’t all fast-food companies basically all the same?
I don’t think they’re ALL the same… but none-the-less hacking is scary! Glad they were able to get a hold of things quickly. Thanks for commenting!