I was scrolling through Instagram today and a post jumped out at me.
It was from a car manufacturer that I like and follow.
However, the image in the post was from a competing car manufacturer.
A little confused, I stopped and stared at the post and then went into the comments. There were already 30+ comments from people like me a little confused as to why they had posted this.
The comments started to get entertaining as people realised this was a big mistake that shouldn’t have happened.
For around 30 minutes this post remained live before it was taken down. Enough time for people to post it to their stories, myself included, and to get screenshots of this big fuckup.
I assume a social media company has both these brands as clients. Someone has scheduled the post but neglected to check the account to which it was being posted and nobody has double checked all the scheduled posts.
This shouldn’t have happened though.
As an agency owner myself, I know how all the different social scheduling tools work. There are checks and balances built into these tools so people can work with many brands at once and keep everything separate. There are also approval stages built-in so someone overall can sign off on the content being published for a brand.
It’s a lesson for agencies to not become complacent when scheduling content for clients, especially when working with brands within the same industry.
It’s also a lesson for businesses that outsource their marketing to agencies to monitor their work and hold them accountable. You don’t want something like this happening to you.
