Last week, MercuryNews.com revealed that Apple made a massive land purchase near their current headquarters in Cupertino, CA. They actually bought the old HP campus, which the electronics giant announced they were moving out of to consolidate their offices in nearby Palo Alto. So perhaps it shouldn’t be too surprising that HP bought something of Apple’s today: their hashtag on Twitter.
Okay, Apple doesn’t technically have any rights to a hashtag containing their name on Twitter. In fact, maybe HP is targeting people tweeting about the fruit. Yeah, right.
As you can see here, the HP Official Store has paid to promote tweets with links to computer sales they’re having to people searching for Apple. They have a group of rotating tweets they’re promoting, but all point to sales they are having at the HP online store — a store which couldn’t look more different from Apple’s.
This kind of rivalry targeting is done all the time on Google and other search engines, but it seems to becoming more of a norm on Twitter as well. A few weeks ago, we saw competing ads on Twitter from Microsoft and Google for mobile.
I wonder how newly prolific Twitter user and Apple executive Phil Schiller likes them apples?
Update: As Steven notes in the comments, HP bought the Twitter ads for #mac as well. Nice.
Update 2: And as Kevin points out below, they bought #macbook as well!
[thanks Kevin]
Started by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne, Apple has expanded from computers to consumer electronics over the last 30 years, officially changing their name from Apple Computer, Inc. to Apple, Inc. in January 2007. Among the key offerings from Apple’s product line are: Pro line laptops (MacBook Pro) and desktops (Mac Pro), consumer line laptops (MacBook Air) and desktops (iMac), servers (Xserve), Apple TV, the Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server operating systems, the iPod, the...
Hewlett-Packard technology corporation headquartered in Palo Alto, California, USA. HP is one of the world’s largest information technology companies and operates in nearly every country. HP specializes in developing and manufacturing computing, data storage, and networking hardware, designing software and delivering services. Major product lines include personal computing devices, enterprise servers, related storage devices, as well as a diverse range of printers and other imaging products. HP markets its products to households, small to medium size businesses and enterprises...
Created in 2006, Twitter is a global real-time communications platform with 400 million monthly visitors to twitter.com, more than 200 million monthly active users around the world. We see a billion tweets every 2.5 days on every conceivable topic. World leaders, major athletes, star performers, news organizations and entertainment outlets are among the millions of active Twitter accounts through which users can truly get the pulse of the planet.
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