5 Brilliant Social Media Campaigns You Can Learn From

21 Jul, 2015

There is more to social media than posting, the occasional sharing of other people’s content or hyping up a one-off give-away contest. The most successful brands are upping their game and going the extra mile to create memorable social experiences for their fans. In a notoriously noisy social media world, doing something special, creative and innovative is the best way to get brand exposure and to grab attention from the right audience.

Here are some brands making waves with their social media campaigns and lessons you can apply to your business.

Domino’s Pizza

Domino’s is known for its disruptive and sometimes humorous methods of engaging its fans. The pizza brand probably made history with its #emojiordering campaign that sought to make it easy and fun for its U.S. customers to order a pizza and have it delivered.

Customers just need to tweet the pizza emoji to @dominos and that five-second exchange would initiate the pizza delivery process. Dominos has been lauded as the first major player in the restaurant sector to integrate Twitter to its delivery system. Within the first few minutes, the ‘Order with a tweet’ campaign, had received 152 retweets and 200 favorites.

Lesson:

Make your social campaigns utilitarian. Your fans want something that will simplify their lives.

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The Four Seasons Hotel

The Four Seasons is constantly at the top of the list of luxury hotels getting it right with social media. Four Seasons’ success can be attributed to the brand’s consistency in developing creative social campaigns that connect with fans. For example, with the ‘FS Food Truck’ campaign, the company came up with a food truck that travelled across three U.S. states to show the expertise of their culinary team. The hotel promoted the food truck campaign across all its social sites and called on fans to come out and meet the team as they travelled and cooked. Fans had a chance win gifts and the campaign attracted thousands of likes on Facebook and retweets on Twitter.

Lesson: Be consistent with your social campaigns to keep your fans constantly engaged and eager to take up your call to action.

Oreo

Oreo is one of the few brands that understand the art of agile marketing—the flair to respond and adapt rapidly to situations and create content that leverages these situations. Perhaps their most memorable example of agile marketing is when Oreo took advantage of the blackout during the 2014 Super Bowl and tweeted “You can still dunk in the dark.” Within 14 hours, this tweet received more than 15,000 retweets. Oreo also piggybacked on the launch of the Sony PS4 console by creatively replacing the PS4 console buttons with its iconic cookies. That agile campaign received 1,760 retweets in less than 5 hours.

Lesson: Social media is naturally fast-paced, requiring that you stay updated with the latest trends so you can quickly adjust your social efforts and respond to these trends aptly.

Tipp-Ex

The Tipp-Ex YouTube campaign dubbed “A Hunter Shoots A Bear” was one of the early viral videos and to date, it continues to be a great example of how a creative social campaign can attract raving fans even for what some may perceive to be a mundane product.

The video shows a hunter faced with the choice ‘to shoot’ or ‘not to shoot’ an approaching bear. The hunter decides not to shoot the bear and erases the word ‘shoot’ using Tipp-ex, instead leaving users to fill in the blank and then see how the hunter and bear respond to the words chosen by the viewer. In less than a week, the 30-second video attracted over 3.5 million views.

Lesson: Add an element of interactivity to your social campaigns. Involving your audience leaves them with a stronger impression of your brand.

AirBnB

Airbnb is one of the few brands that leverage the benefits of several social sites; it has succeeded on Google+, a platform where many brands have floundered. Airbnb is also on top of the Twitter and Vine game. A remarkable campaign was the “Hollywood and Vines”, a short film created through Vines outsourced from users.

Airbnb fans were invited and given instructions on how to create specific clips with their cameras. Fans were then required to send their Vines within 48 hours for a chance to receive Airbnb credit worth $100. The campaign generated more than 750 submissions, and more than 100 were used to create the short film. The film attracted over 60,000 views on the brand’s YouTube channel and was featured on the Sundance Film Festival.

Lesson: Once again, directly engaging your audience makes your campaigns more meaningful. Also, do not be afraid of exploring other social media platforms to gain broader brand exposure.

Great Marketing Campaigns

The greatest lesson you can borrow from these brands is to think-out-of the box when it comes to launching social campaigns that make an impact. More importantly, the most successful campaigns are those that are less promotional and more focused on offering value, whether that’s a travel credit, a pizza, a cookie or simply a memorable video.

Which social media platform have you had most success on with your campaigns?