Social media is one of the most effective, if not cheapest, ways to engage with existing customers and increase awareness of a brand among new markets. With huge proportions of the world’s population actively using at least one of the many social networks, it would be unthinkable for any marketers worth their ‘likes’ not to use social channels.
Quite frankly, there’s no quicker way to communicate a message, nor an easier way for people to share rich multimedia content too. Content released over social media can have immediate effects – with themes trending in Twitter in mere minutes.
To demonstrate the impact of this as a marketing tool, here are five of the very best social media campaigns. Ever.
1. Dumb Ways To Die
Public safety initiatives have traditionally been dull and boring, rarely capturing the imagination of the intended audience. However, Melbourne Transit Authority (MTA) changed all that in 2012 with its cute animation, designed to raise awareness of safety when using the transport network.
Set to a track called ‘Dumb Ways To Die’, it featured several little bean characters meeting their fate in lots of silly ways, with the last ones being transport-related. To date, it’s received over 65 million YouTube visits, while the song was released via several platforms, to make sure it spread. The campaign received a lot of attention at very little expense.
2. Which Bean Are You?
When Heinz launched its new Five Beanz product, it created an accompanying Facebook competition through which fans could discover which of the five different beans they ‘were’, based on their personality.
To further engage with their fans, Heinz chose ‘winners’ every hour, each of whom comically received a bean, while those that shared the quiz with ten people received a goodie bag. Participants were also given coupons so that they could try the beans. During the two weeks of the campaign, 22,000 took the quiz, while 10,000 people shared it, resulting in a Facebook reach of around 11 million.
3. Dancing Pony
Three Mobile’s dancing pony campaign has been one of the biggest successes of 2013. Starting with a television advert in which a Shetland pony was seen moon-walking across the countryside in time to Fleetwood Mac’s ’Everywhere’, with the hashtag #danceponydance.
It immediately went viral across the social media platforms, receiving one million views over the first weekend. With the tagline: ‘Silly stuff, it matters’, it represented the weird content that people like to share. It’s been viewed now around 7.5 million times – little wonder, as phase two of the campaign featured a ‘pony mixer’ in which fans could dress the pony and pick a song for it to dance to. Engaging and ingenious. If not a bit silly.
4. Chocolate Facebook Thumb
Cadbury’s launched their ambitious campaign – to construct a giant Facebook ‘like’ thumb from pieces of Dairy Milk bars – in order to increase engagement on their Facebook page.
The idea was to present fans of the page with the thumb as a symbol of thanks for hitting to one million fan-mark. The chocolate firm ran a teaser campaign before the event, then streamed a real-time video of the project, which was seen by 350,000. Cadbury’s also gained an additional 40,000 new fans and represents another brilliant win in a series of engaging social media campaigns. (Credit: Cadbury Dairy Milk)
5. The Truth
If ever there was a way to respond to a disgruntled individual successfully via social media, then Bodyform’s message is it. Having received a tongue-in-cheek comment from a man who complained that their adverts misrepresented the menstrual cycle, the company decided to respond with an equally amusing video, explaining why it didn’t show men ‘the real truth’.
The video subsequently received 5.4 million YouTube views and thousands of Facebook likes. It was also praised for being an innovative piece of customer service management.
[Source: SocialMediaRevolver]
