Taco Bell's Facebook Marketing For Cool Ranch Doritos Totally Backfired

On March 5, Taco Bell posted a message on Facebook to its 9.8 million fans stating that the highly-anticipated Cool Ranch Doritos Locos Tacos would be available March 6, a day earlier than expected.

While this had the making of a great social media marketing fairy tale, today things took a turn for the worst.

Here's the post that got "Liked" 91,994 times (and counting.)

Normally 3,000 plus comments are a good sign of successful engagement. But not when they look like this:

Facebook, Taco Bell

Customer after customer have been trying to get the buzz-worthy Cool Ranch DLTs at their local Taco Bells to no avail. And they're getting angry.

People are angrily posting on Taco Bell's Facebook page about their immense disappointment. "I've never been more angry in my life," Shawn Oliver writes.

Attempted purchasers wrote to Consumerist, “I got denied for my cool ranch one as well,” says a customer in Oklahoma. “They said not till tomorrow … I even [showed] them the Twitter post and Facebook status and they said nope.”

Others complained that no restaurants in South Florida were participating.

A Taco Bell spokesperson relayed to AP that "the early delivery was only at participating restaurants. She said customers should call ahead to verify their locations had the tacos."

But there's the problem with making such an announcement on Facebook and Twitter. The posts aren't visible only to people who frequent participating stores. Without any form of disclaimer, that's begging for disappointment.

While Taco Bell has clearly heard about the fiasco and angry fans at this point, it has yet to respond to its fans who have been lining up for unavailable tacos.

There's no Facebook response and Taco Bell's Twitter account even proliferates the myth.

Taco Bell recently retweeted assertions of the early Cool Ranch DLT release:

A Taco Bell spokesperson emailed BI with the statement: "While the official launch day of Cool Ranch Doritos Locos Tacos is tomorrow, we’re humbled by the overwhelming response to Fan Day. We apologize to those fans who couldn’t buy it a day early and are working hard to have all participating locations honor Fan Day today. We want to assure everyone that Cool Ranch Doritos Locos Tacos will be available nationwide tomorrow, March 7."

No comment on what went wrong.

SEE ALSO: We tried Taco Bell's Cool Ranch Doritos Locos Tacos and it was amazing: