A cheeky Nokia tweet poking fun at its rival Apple has gone down as one of the most retweeted brand tweets ever.

During Apple's much-hyped launch event for its new iPhones earlier this month, Nokia momentarily stole the limelight with a timely tweet pointing out the similarity between the newly unveiled iPhone 5s colour phones and its own range of bright designs.

The two-word tweet from Nokia's UK account - "Thanks, #Apple" - accompanied by a picture declaring "Imitation is the best form of flattery" quickly went viral and has since garnered an astonishing 38,000 retweets. A Twitter staffer has confirmed that puts it in the top echelons of marketing tweets in the site's history.

Oliver Snoddy, Twitter's head of planning, told a conference last week: "This tweet got more retweets than Oreo's 'Dunk in the dark' tweet from the Super Bowl." The Oreo tweet, which capitalised brilliantly on a power cut during America's most watched sporting spectacle, is often heralded as the definitive example of what is being dubbed 'moment marketing'.

On a night when ads on the CBS TV network were being sold for as much as £2.5m, Oreo became one of the Super Bowl's most talked-about brands without having to pay a penny. The cookie brand's quick thinking message on Twitter was rewarded with almost 16,000 retweets and the kind of fawning newsprint coverage that paid-up advertisers could only dream of.

But having scored more than double that number of retweets with its iPhone backhander, Nokia's UK social media team can now boast about not just stealing Apple's thunder - but Oreo's too.