Social Media Marketing

Between Google's news and Facebook's outage, this week on Twitter was dominated by tech giants. However, National Coffee Day was also this week - we're calling Dunkin Donuts the winner.

Tech giants had a strong presence on Twitter this week. Thanks to a steady stream of news and milestones - the lawsuit truce with Microsoft, the new Android products, and its 17th birthday, Google was trending pretty much all week, generating nearly 900,000 Tweets.

Its own Tweets unveiling the latest Chromecast and Nexus 6P saw plenty of engagement, but it had nothing on the number of likes and retweets one timely Google Doodle inspired.

While Mars showed signs of water, Sunday night marked the rare "super blood moon" lunar eclipse, so space was also trending this week. More media outlets than brands tweeted pictures of the brilliant red moon, though NASA was obviously all over that topic. But rather than simply Tweet a picture, the government agency shared a time zone tracker and links to its celestial live feed.

Perhaps brands' social media teams planned to go into work the next day and compose some Tweets about the eclipse, but were distracted by this unspeakable horror: Facebook was down on Monday. Though the outage - which is estimated to lose Facebook $1.7 in ad revenue per hour, according to TheStreet - only last 40 minutes, the Tweets went on for much longer.

While Romanians enjoyed their free KFC, users took to Twitter to bemoan not being able to know what their friends ate or (Read more...) they went to the gym. Brands got on board with that as well.

Denny's was hilarious, as usual, while Krispy Kreme used a product shot to convey the despair felt by all. Meanwhile, the National Park Service was like, "Maybe go outside?"

Many brands had Tweets about Facebook, though they weren't all good ones. C'mon, Puffs, who calls people?

Angie's List, the website crowd-sourcing local business reviews, decided to instead focus on positive, waiting until Facebook came back to Tweet.

Red Bull was up on all the trending topics week, tweeting about both Facebook being down and National Coffee Day, which was on Tuesday.

Naturally, coffee brands like Nescafé and Starbucks tweeted about National Coffee Day, with the latter taking the opportunity to raise awareness about its latest content marketing effort, 1912 Pike.

National Coffee Day generated enough buzz that plenty of non-coffee brands - and our president - chimed in. Disney gave a shout out to coffee's magical properties with a fun Vine and lyrics from a Cinderella song, while President Obama used coffee as an in to possibly meet you.

But no brand made better use of the #NationalCoffeeDay hashtag than Dunkin Donuts. In addition to a partnership with MLB, resulting in the baseball organization sending Dunkin-branded Tweets every hour, Dunkin Donuts used online marketing to drive offline sales in a very effective way: reminding people that there was free coffee to be had.

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