Tweets of the Week: Starbucks, singles, and supporting our troops

Responses to Starbucks' red cups spilled into this week, which marked Veteran's Day, Singles Day and National Sundae Day. Taco Bell celebrated none of those things, though it did tweet a lot of funny emojis.

It’s atypical for brands to comment about other brands, but Starbucks’ red cup controversy has been such a force on social media that many, like Target and Hefty, chimed in anyway. It all started last Thursday, but enough gasoline has been poured on the fire – Donald Trump calling for a boycott, Dunkin Donuts releasing its own “Joy” cup – that #RedCups continued trending this week.

And Starbucks has continued to do a great job dealing with the incident. While the brand has pointedly refused to engage with Trump or acknowledge the “War on Christmas” faction in any way, it’s certainly done its part to subtly keep the conversation going.

Many of Starbucks’ responses to its fans this week have included #RedCups, with the accompanying emoji, of course.

starbucks-redcup-response

#TacoEmojiEngine

Starbucks wasn’t the only one engaging its followers with branded emojis this week. On Monday, Taco Bell launched its #TacoEmojiEngine, which creates a brand new emoji whenever you Tweet the brand a taco emoji alongside any other one.

The initial announcement got more than 4,000 likes and retweets, and created tons of engagement. Since I started writing this paragraph, Taco Bell has tweeted nearly 40 responses, which gives you a sense of why the brand is so contagious.

For its engine, Taco Bell created more than 600 pieces of unique content. I can’t decide whether my favorite is the knight using a taco to keep a dragon at bay…

…or the taco standing victoriously over the slice of pizza it knocked out in the boxing ring.

Simple thanks: not enough to make a splash on Veteran’s Day

Nothing gets brands tweeting quite like a holiday, even if it’s not a particularly festive one, like Veteran’s Day. Holiday tweets are also really easy.

Countless brands tweeted their support at our veterans, thanking them for their service, but that’s not enough to stand out. Southwest Airlines capitalized on the Veteran’s Day buzz by highlighting its partnership with A Million Thanks, a charity that sends handwritten notes to soldiers deployed overseas.

GMC did something similar, using the promoted #EnlistMe hashtag to raise awareness for its campaign centered on building homes for veterans.

Meanwhile, other brands promoted their respective initiatives to help veterans. Starbucks pledges to hire 10,000 veterans and military spouses within the next two years, while Lockheed Martin is already there. The aerospace company’s workforce includes more than 22,500 veterans, the highest number of any employer on Monster.com.

We can all agree that Starbucks is the winner of Twitter this week, right? The brand also tweeted out reminders that on Veteran’s Day, military personnel and their spouses get free coffee. The coffee giant was far from the only chain showing its appreciation with discounts or freebies. However, many of the others didn’t promote their offers at all on Twitter.

Uber and Lyft didn’t tweet about the free rides they were offering veterans, though they did retweet the announcement from the White House.

But others like Applebee’s, Little Caesars, Dairy Queen and Denny’s never said anything, which was strange. Strange is kind of Denny’s thing, though, as evidenced by the fact that the brand did tweet this:

National Sundae Day brings out bizarre brands

November 11 was not only Veteran’s Day, but National Sundae Day, as well. Not many brands tweeted about that one, presumably because they had no idea National Sundae Day was a thing. But this is a noteworthy trend because the results were so hilariously random.

None of the brands you’d associate with a sundae joined in. Carvel, Ben & Jerry’s, Breyer’s, Friendly’s: nowhere to be found. On the other hand, Vegas.com was all over that.

Serendipity is an iconic sweets shop with a location in Caesars Palace. OK, Vegas.com, we see we’re you’re going with that. You get a pass. However, Butterball? Speedo? What?

$ingle$ Day $hatter$ online $hopping record$

In the U.S., we spend November 11 thanking our veterans and wondering what the hell turkey and bathing suits have to do with ice cream. For Chinese consumers, that day is all about shopping.

This Singles Day, Alibaba, broke e-commerce records, raking in the equivalent of $14.3 billion over 24 hours. Throughout the day, Xiaomi was the top seller. The Beijing-based electronics brand had 100 million orders within 12 minutes, and sent many tweets to keep that number going.

Chinavision also tweeted its deals, albeit less aggressively than Xiaomi.

Alibaba spent the day tweeting a series of jaw-dropping statistics. This year’s Singles Day generated $5 billion in revenue in the first 90 minutes, and last year’s total was surpassed halfway through the day. Starbucks may have won Twitter this week, but Alibaba won the Internet.

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