They did it again.

There was backlash of utterly inevitable proportions this week when West Ham’s Twitter account got involved with National Poetry Day. There was a predictable reaction from the club’s supporters on the platform to a fairly ill-advised attempt to get involved with the Twitter trend of the day.

It's #NationalPoetryDay, so tweet us your @WestHamUtd efforts and we'll RT ???? our favourites…

— West Ham United (@WestHamUtd) October 6, 2016

Aside from the fact that a tweet like that is usually quite a strong troll magnet, this time it went over truly terribly given the club is currently enduring something of a crisis.

Failure against Astra Giurgiu in the Europa League playoff round saw an early European exit, and that was only the beginning of their problems. The controversial move into their new stadium hasn’t been hitch-free, their league form has been poor and some fans are already calling for their manager to be sacked.

And so on Thursday, we wrote that the social media accounts of football clubs don’t exist in a vacuum – that the club’s form and the mood of the fans have to be taken into account. At the moment, the fans’ unrest means that when the club is too jovial on its social media channels, it just looks like they aren’t taking the current problems seriously enough: even if the players are all away on international duty and the manager and staff are working overtime behind the scenes to rectify the problems.

That’s the problem facing clubs on social media: although they clearly employ social media managers who have literally nothing to do with the playing side of the club, and yet fans will automatically link the Twitter account to the first team.

But in a way, that’s a good thing: it means the official social accounts are doing their job properly by providing the club with a way of engaging with their fans.

Of course, fans do know about social media managers – but there is some sort of subconscious link with the official-ness of the account and the club and its playing staff.

But if West Ham didn’t realise that engaging with National Poetry Day would be considered as a baiting of their fans given the current situation, then only a day after the backlash they should have known that getting involved with ‘World Smile Day’ would have had exactly the same effect:

'All people smile in the same language' ???? #WorldSmileDay pic.twitter.com/jXjqaidabC

— West Ham United (@WestHamUtd) October 7, 2016

@WestHamUtd West Ham fans aren't exactly smiling lately so no they don't

— West Ham Transfers (@westhamtransfer) October 7, 2016

@WestHamUtd 18th in the league, 4 points from 21, increasingly angry fans. Not much to smile about tbh????????

— ⚒SKA4LIFE⚒ (@TOMTHEHAMMER67) October 7, 2016

Yet again, West Ham, context is key.