Last week, as Apple was announcing the iPhone 5C, its first colored iPhone, Nokia's marketing team took a moment to poke fun at the company's latest innovation. A tweet posted to the Nokia UK account simply said "thanks, Apple" and was accompanied by an image of the rainbow-hued Lumia family alongside the text "imitation is the best form of flattery." In the never-ending smartphone wars, it was the perfect fodder for Microsoft and Nokia fans to poke fun at Apple — and it has turned into one of the most successful branded tweets ever. The tweet has racked up over 38,000 retweets, and Business Insider reports that Twitter confirmed Nokia's tweet is in the "top echelon" of marketing tweets in the site's history.

Oliver Snoddy, Twitter's head of planning, compared Nokia's well-timed jab to Oreo's tweet during the Super Bowl power outage — a cheeky, well-timed message with an image noting that you can still "dunk in the dark." That tweet gather nearly 16,000 retweets and was hailed as a great example of a company thinking quickly and using social media to get a lot of essentially free publicity. By comparison, Nokia's tweet has more than double the retweets in a far smaller time period. Of course, it's worth noting that Nokia didn't exactly invent the idea of multi-colored consumer electronics products, and Apple's been pushing colored iPods for years — but the Lumia line certainly did bring colors back to the cell phone market in a noticeable way. Besides, just about anything goes in the smartphone wars these days, particularly on Twitter.