Skittles switches homepage from Twitter to Facebook (what’s next?)

March 3, 2009 | Eric Eldon | Comments |
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Skittles, the rainbow-colored chewy sugar candy that makes me sick to my stomach and gives me cavities, has just made its Facebook fan Page its official home page. This is at least a temporary switch from its last incarnation — a Twitter search page showing you other people’s tweets about Skittles, which appeared last weekend. Perhaps the company is trying to figure out how many users of various social networks it can attract and learn about through this gimmick? What’s next, a Skittles MySpace profile?

Skittles’ Twitter search page was problematic because semi-anonymous Twitter users were spamming it with crude and racist remarks. Perhaps the new Page is a better choice, as it forces people to join the page using their (generally) real-world Facebook identities. As MG Siegler wrote about the Twitter version of the Mars-owned confection’s web page:

Naturally, people are already spamming the hell out of this. One tweet being repeated over and over again unfortunately uses a racial slur. As such, I suspect this little experiment will end rather soon for Skittles. I’m a firm believer in the power of Twitter Search as perhaps the most compelling thing about the service, but the candy’s use of the feature just feels gimmicky. It would have been better as a part of the site, not as the homepage. My advice: I know times are tough, but hire a web designer.

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Photo of Eric Eldon

About the Author, Eric Eldon

Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.

  • Skittles could eliminate the manual birthday entry if they just used facebook connect. ;)

    It would also be cool if they took facebook connect another layer deeper and exposed some additional user behaviors across all the networks. It can be done.

    I think this is mildly brilliant, we will see more of this rather than less in the future. By most all metrics this is a successful "campaign" move/experiment. Does it have longevity? Not unless it morphs further into engagement.

    cheers!
    Rodney Rumford
    http://www.twitterbusinessbook.com
  • What Skittles gets out of this -- that could be valuable in the long term -- is more data about which users on which social networks like to eat Skittles.
  • and tons of press, attention and hype. They get to part of the conversation for awhile and don't have to pay a thing for it
  • Wick
    Some ad company did this a couple years ago. The menu doesnt go to any local pages, it uses information thats already available on other sites. When I looked at this, it was hooked into Twitter, Facebook, and WikiPedia.
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