When it comes to Twitter, the official accounts of Premier League clubs usually play it quite safe.
Y’know – team news an hour before kick off, official announcements about new players or contract renewals, live-tweeting matches that people are probably watching on telly anyway… that sort of thing.
Although there are a couple of exceptions, such accounts rarely show us much in the way of personality or humour. When they do attempt a funny tweet, they’re sure to be greeted with numerous requests to ‘delete’ it.
Whereas Manchester United have amassed 10 million followers on Twitter in the last few years, it’s hard to recall any examples of them interacting with fans on the page without trying to promote Chevrolet or one of their other sponsors at the same time.
To be fair, you can’t blame the folks tasked with running the United page for turning a blind eye to the thousands of daily fan requests to ‘announce’ a certain player, or get rid of a ‘fraud’ player or manager – as if running a club’s social media page gives them some influence over those matters.
But on February 10, 2017, whoever had the keys to @ManUtd did interact with one of its supporters – and while it’s not going to cause anyone to rupture their abdomen with laughter, many supporters appreciated what they did.
There’s a bit of a back story to this one. A twitter user with the handle @MinimumMartial has, rather persistently, replied ‘Ok’ to a shit load of the club’s tweets. Here, look…
You get the idea.
Quite why he’s spent his time doing this isn’t clear, but he almost certainly didn’t expect to get a response.
But on Friday afternoon, @MinimumMartial (whose real name appears to be Adam) did receive a tweet from the official United account.
Minding his own business tweeting about FIFA 17, United’s account was only ever going to reply in one way…
With over 500 retweets at the last time of counting, it seems plenty of people appreciated United’s decision to break away from their usual tweets.