Butterball Will Now Answer Turkey Questions via Text and Twitter
Thanksgiving home cooks who are too tech savvy to bother making a phone call but not tech savvy enough to find the answers they need on Google finally have the solution they’ve been looking for: Butterball has announced that for the first time ever, the company will be answering people’s turkey cooking questions via text and Twitter.
The well-known turkey brand has been running a telephone hotline during the Thanksgiving season dating all the way back to 1981 – a time when, lest you forget, telephone hotlines were both pretty cool and helpful being that the only other resources to get answers to a question were asking drunk relatives, looking it up in Encyclopedia Britannica or literally running out to the streets shouting for help. So for decades, dialing 1-800-BUTTERBALL was a very convenient way to address questions like, “Wait, is this a chicken or a turkey?”
But though the Butterball hotline was helpful, at its core, it’s essentially a marketing tool – and marketers will tell you that the most important people to reach these days are millennials. Millennials, of course, are far more likely to use their phone for Snapchat filters than to call an 800 number, so it only makes sense that Butterball is taking the plunge into modern turkey times by adding a texting and Twitter option.
From November 17 to 24, experts will be available 24 hours a day to answer texts sent to (844) 877-3456. If Twitter is more your speed,Huffington Post reportsthat@butterballis also open for business, though it’s not clear if experts are also monitoring the handle around the clock or whether it’s just the usual snarky social media manager doing the best he can with his creative writing degree.
And for you retro-loving hipsters, 1-800-BUTTERBALL is still operating from now until Christmas Eve.Butterball saysthat last year alone over 100,000 questions were answered via the hotline. I wonder how many of them were, “Um, I bought this turkey for Thanksgiving, but is it still good for Christmas Eve?”