5 of the most successful social media marketing campaigns

 Social media marketing is currently one of the best brand promotion channels. For it to be termed successful, any campaign involving the use of a particular social media outlet should be unique and captivating enough to grab its targeted audience. Above all, the campaign should be appealing to engage the prospects with your brand. This particular piece will try to analyze some of the social media marketing campaigns that have been able to boost awareness and the revenues of some brands. The article will focus on the following social media channels: Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Pinterest and YouTube.

Nike Olympics: #Findgreatness on Twitter

This was probably one of the most successful campaigns pulled off by Nike. Regardless of their rivals Adidas being one of the official sponsors of the tournament, Nike stole the show by pulling off one of the tournament’s favorite campaigns on twitter which went by the hashtag Findgreatness. The London Olympics Games which were held last year saw a number of ads being put on billboards but what dominated most of them contained the encryptions ‘find greatness’. Even Adidas’s #takethestage did not match up.

Statistics released from Socialbaker’s CheerMeter that between the period July 27th and August 2nd in the year 2012, Nike received over 16,000 tweets which associated the keyword Olympics with Nike. On the other hand Adidas received a mere 9,295 tweets during the same period and on the same matter. On Facebook, Nike gained around 166,000 fans as opposed to Adidas’s 80,000.

Burger King Whooper Sacrifice on Facebook

This was probably one of the most interesting campaigns done by Burger King. The campaign put many friendships to the test. According to Burger King, they offered to reward anyone who deleted ten of their friends from their personal Facebook account would receive a free whooper burger. The wicked thing about this specific campaign is that, once you got to delete a friend, he/she was instantly informed that his/her so called friend valued a burger more over their friendship. This campaign took place during 2009 and caused the sacrifice of over 233,000 friendships.

The way it worked was very simple. The participants were required to sign up to the campaign by simply visiting whoppersacrifice.com and from there they were redirected to their Facebook account. The success of the campaign caught the eye of Facebook which decided to terminate it immediately and justifying this decision by saying that this kind of actions is a serious breach to the privacy policy. During the same year, the campaign managed to scoop a couple of awards including Gold for Web Applications and the ultimate ADC Hybrid award at the Art Directors Annual Awards.

Granata Pet Dog Food Check In on Foursquare

As a Germany pet food company, Granata Pet developed one of the most unique marketing campaigns on Foursquare. The interactive campaign involved the company setting up a number of billboards in Germany with dog food dispensers. Those who visited those billboards were asked to check in on Foursquare and as a reward they received free dog food through the dispenser.

The campaign led to increased sales of Granata pet food and the company’s Facebook page received a lot of hits from fans who checked in through Foursquare and shared this information with their friends.

Uniqlo Dry Mesh Project on Pinterest

In 2012, Uniqlo, a Japanese clothing company got its own share of social media success when they came up with the Dry Mesh Project campaign on Pinterest. In this campaign, around 100 people with Uniqlo accounts hit Pinterest simultaneously to pin and create a style which was similar an old film strip. The result was a large mosaic visual board on Pinterest. The board portrayed the different brands of their products on a single Pinterest board. At the end of the day, people responded with positive feedback.

Tippex Create Your Own Ending on YouTube

Tippex came up with a very interactive social marketing campaign on YouTube. The clip which was dubbed ‘hunter shoots a bear’ attracted many viewers. According to the campaign, the shooting does not actually occur because the hunter finally changes his mind and grabs an enormous Tippex to remove the word shoot. The campaign required the viewer to fit in a word in the empty space. The written word will appear in a new video with those actions. The video managed to receive over 21 million views from the time it was posted on August 2010.