Last week, you may have seen Burger King’s twitter get hacked. In case you missed it, a team of hackers were able to log into the account on President’s Day (we assume their social media team took the day off) and changed the picture and name to none other than their biggest competitor, McDonalds. The background and skin were also changed to pictures of chicken nuggets! The hackers then went on to tweet about how McDonald’s bought our Burger King because the “whopper flopped.” Before Burger King was able to notice what was happening, an hour later, they gained an astonishing 30,000 followers! Sounds like a quick and easy way to gain followers – of course people are going to start following a hacked account of a famous company to see what funny things are being said. Between the trending topics #BurgerKing and #McDonalds, they were destined for social media spotlight.
Just one day after this hack, Jeep gets hacked! There were tons of similarities between the hack of BK and Jeep. The Jeep twitter claimed to have been sold to Chrysler. There were also shout out’s and references to the previous day’s. This hack didn’t get nearly as much attention. Get we get a social media ‘yaaaawn’? Trends are very quick and must be taken advantage of quickly. However, with something of this extent, it could be too much to copy the trend. The automobile maker only got a measly couple thousand followers for their attempt.But are some companies now hacking their own Twitters in hopes of getting recognition on Burger King’s level?
The same day, MTV and BET (both owned by Viacom) opted to hack EACH OTHER’S accounts. They switched identities and began to tweet at each other. #MTVhack quickly began to circulate and social media cynics caught on quickly. It all seemed too good to be true – within minutes of their ‘hack’, savvy social media enthusiasts could tell it was a hoax. MTV did come out and say it was a ‘Catfish’ – at least we saw this Catfish coming.
We hope this trend doesn’t last forever. Since the writing of this article, Donald Trump has also apprently been hacked. Some advice for corporate/celebrity twitter accounts – change your passwords!