It feels like every week there’s some sort of social media gaffe to grab our attention in the world of sport.

Engaging with your audience in real time on social media platforms is hard, let’s be fair. You have to be engaging and funny yet insightful at the same time, and if you run a big account – say, the official account of a big organisation – then people scrutinise your tweets much more closely than they usually do. It takes a certain type of person to get that right.

But sometimes you don’t need to actually scrutinise to see a glaring flaw. Sometimes a gaffe is just a gaffe. And one that everyone sees. Just as the manager of the UEFA Champions League’s official Twitter account found out this week:

Is it just me or @ChampionsLeague just used the middle finger..? ???????????? #UCL #WednesdayWisdom pic.twitter.com/pl5fDlw3XK

— 3m0o0r hæçhêm (@O_Hachem) August 24, 2016

Yes, instead of using a ‘finger pointing up’ emoji, they used a middle finger emoji….

The now-deleted tweet was clearly meant in good faith: the image, of Borussia Monchengladbach goalkeeper Yann Sommer with his finger pointing up, and the emoji would go together. If only they’d picked the right one.

It’s an honest mistake, and it’s a simple mistake. It highlights both the care and time you need to take to make sure you get everything right if you’re running a big organisation’s Twitter account, and especially around sport when so many people on social media are engaged with the topic.

But if you take that sort of care and time to get things right, sometimes you’ll feel like you’re reacting slowly to events people are already talking about. That’s the dilemma facing the social media manager.

Perhaps taking that extra little bit of time would have saved a whole lot of embarrassment.