Want to get the word out about something exciting within your business? A social media campaign can help you do it.
With a staggering number of daily users across social platforms (Facebook alone sees more than 2.1 billion people each day), there are few places where you can reach so much of your audience all at once.
That’s why learning to design, build, and run strong social media campaigns is a vital marketing skill. Here, we’ll look at what they are and reflect on some of the best social media campaign examples from the early days of social to today.
Contents
- What is a social media campaign?
- Why do I need to create a social media campaign?
- Best social media campaign examples
What is a social media campaign?
A social media campaign is a set of posts unified by a strategy serving a distinct goal or objective. Social media campaigns are often run alongside other marketing efforts and can be part of a more extensive marketing campaign.
This social media campaign for Starbucks’ new Spicy Lemonade Refreshers has a clear visual throughline that makes it obvious these posts are all part of the same promotional effort.
For example, if you are launching a new product, you will build a marketing campaign to announce and promote the offering, and social media will be one of the many channels you use to share the news with your audience. You’ll likely also send emails, update your website, issue a press release, and maybe have leadership talk about it on podcasts or in other media.
All of these efforts, including the social media campaign, are working in service of the broader goal: to introduce your new product to the world.
Get copy-and-paste social media posts for all your campaigns in this free social media template!
Why do I need to create a social media campaign?
A social media campaign is run in service of a specific goal. That might be:
- Launching your business
- Announcing a new product or service
- Opening a new location
- Promoting a sale
- Building brand awareness
- Generating leads
- Celebrating your company culture
While you’ll continue to post some regular, unrelated social content as the campaign runs, all posts that are part of the campaign will serve that shared objective.
No matter what kind of campaign you’re running, these steps can help you create an effective campaign.
Free guide >> 6 Simple Steps to a Complete Small Business Marketing Plan (+Template!)
10 of the best social media campaign examples
To inspire your social media campaign creation, let’s look back at some of the most iconic and successful examples of all time. Social media hasn’t been around that long, but we’ve already seen some memorable campaigns that have become a part of the modern marketing history books.
1. Spotify: Wrapped
In 2016, Spotify first released its Wrapped list, which provides its users with a recap of what they listened to throughout the previous year. You can see top artists, genres, songs, podcasts, total listening time, and more.
In the intervening years, Spotify Wrapped has become a global phenomenon. In 2022,156 million users engaged with Spotify Wrapped, and the brand has (very savvily) built the entire Wrapped campaign to be shareable on social media.
People love posting their musical tastes and listening habits—even if you’re slightly embarrassed by some of your top artists or songs, it’s a fun conversation starter.
At this point, it’s become a cultural event; people genuinely look forward to Spotify Wrapped Day each December. And if you happen to be on social media when Wrapped drops, your friends’ lists will take over your feed.
2. ALS Association: Ice Bucket Challenge
It’s been a decade since the Ice Bucket Challenge, but its impact on the culture is indelible. You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who hasn’t heard of it, and millions of people participated–the campaign raised $115 million for ALS research, which still powers the ALS Association’s work today.
What made the Ice Bucket Challenge so successful (in addition to the fact that it was for a worthy cause) was that it had virality baked in. When you participated—by dumping a bucket of icy water onto your head and agreeing to donate to the ALS Association—you earned the right to “tag” friends, asking them to take the challenge next.
As we know, with exponential growth, if everyone who took the challenge invited two people to participate, the number of people dumping water on their heads would grow very quickly. And as celebrities got involved, the campaign’s popularity ballooned even further.
3. “This Barbie is…”: The Barbie Movie
The Barbie Movie purportedly spent $150 million on marketing, so the juggernaut campaign was way bigger than social media alone. But many of its early moves—before the premieres and Barbie-themed red carpet looks—happened on social media.
The ”This Barbie is…” campaign went viral in the early days of the movie promotion. The original images were created to introduce the various Barbie characters that would populate the film, but it took off on social media as a meme.
“This Barbie is…” images started popping up across social for different individuals and brands. Warner Brothers made getting in on the trend easy by creating a Barbie Selfie Generator tool, so anyone can share what kind of Barbie they are.
4. Old Spice: Smell Like a Man
The first commercial in this campaign became an instant classic when it debuted on YouTube in 2010 before enjoying a run on television. The ad featured a handsome, shirtless man inviting ladies to buy Old Spice if they wanted their men to be more like him.
The idea for the ad came when research uncovered that 60% of body wash purchases were made by women. The agency Wieden + Kennedy wrote a spot to speak directly to these women buying grooming products for their husbands, brothers, and sons.
The viral hit turned its featured actor, Isaiah Mustafa, into a regular fixture on talk shows. And the success of the first commercial inspired follow-up ads featuring Mustafa and Terry Crews.
Likely inspired by its early success online, Old Spice and its agency have continued to build social media marketing campaigns, like this one on Twitch, which announced the launch of its new deodorant scent, Krakengärd.
5. Team USA and Carly Rae Jepsen: “Call Me Maybe”
Sure, you’ve created great social media campaigns, but have any of them ever resulted in a gold medal at the Olympics?
This one didn’t begin as an intentional campaign, which makes it a bit of an outlier on this list. But the unexpected nature of the campaign goes to show that sometimes a viral moment can inspire a marketing campaign, rather than the other way around.
Picture this: It’s late July 2012. The London Olympics are about to kick off, and mere weeks ago, Carly Rae Jepsen debuted her song “Call Me Maybe.” The pop tune is a certified bop, and it’s gone viral, with people lip-syncing to it and posting the videos online.
As the swimmers on Team USA head overseas, they film their version of the “Call Me Maybe” challenge. The internet loses its mind. The song becomes the unofficial anthem of the Olympics, with the lip sync clips ricocheting across traditional and social media.
Perhaps most astoundingly, in an interview from later that year, Michael Phelps attributes some of Team USA’s success in filming the video, saying that working together to create it helped the team bond.
6. McDonald’s: Grimace Shake
Released in honor of Grimace’s birthday, this electric-purple sweet treat went viral on social media when it debuted in 2023.
Before the launch, McDonald’s kicked off the social media campaign by sharing this image of Grimace with an 80s-fabulous vibe where he teases the beverage.
While McDonald’s posted updates about Grimace’s birthday celebrations, which included his enjoying his signature drink, the Grimace Shake took on a life of its own over on TikTok.
There, a wacky trend started to form among young users. They filmed videos of themselves sampling the shake, then meeting an untimely demise. In early videos, it seemed that the shake itself did them in—does it get that electric-purple hue from radioactive material?
But the trend evolved so that shake imbibers met grim fates in abandoned basements, dark woods, and other spooky areas. The exact storyline was unclear—was Grimace hunting them down, or was it something else?—but these videos were everywhere. The “challenge” went so viral that McDonald’s eventually commented on it (as Grimace, of course).
While this social media campaign is an interesting case, because what started out as a brand-driven campaign took on a life of its own. McDonald’s was smart enough to let the TikTok trend play out and to acknowledge what the shake fans had created.
7. REI: #OptOutside
REI first launched this campaign in 2015 after choosing to close its stores on Black Friday, giving its employees the chance to #OptOutside and enjoy time with family and friends. REI is a mission-driven cooperative that “believe[s] that a life outdoors is a life well lived,” and this campaign reinforces this guiding ideal.
Today, the #OptOutside campaign runs year-round. REI encourages followers to use the branded hashtag whenever they’re out enjoying the great outdoors, and the company often reshares that user-generated content.
8. Starbucks: Pumpkin Spice Latte Season
No brand does seasonal marketing quite like Starbucks, and perhaps the crown jewel in its seasonal offerings is the pumpkin spice latte.
Starbucks first introduced the drink in 2003, and like several other examples on this list, the first day of pumpkin spice latte season has become an anticipated annual event.
To capitalize on the drink’s popularity, Starbucks begins to tease its launch on social media in the weeks leading up to that first day. All the brand needed to do last year was share an image of a pumpkin toward the end of summer, and the post generated nearly 7,000 comments on Instagram.
Throughout the fall season, Starbucks continues to post about the pumpkin spice latte, often using the hashtags #PSL and #PumpkinSpice, which fans also employ to celebrate the return of the beverage.
9. Apple: #ShotoniPhone
Apple has long positioned itself as the purveyor of tech products for creative people, so it makes sense that they’d want to highlight product features that speak to that audience.
Enter the high-quality camera on Apple’s iPhone. The #ShotoniPhone campaign showed truly stunning photography taken, not with a fancy professional camera with a huge lens, but with the humble iPhone camera.
Apple ran a campaign that featured these images both online and offline. It even hosted social media contests, inviting users to add the hashtag when posting their best camera phone photos. Today, the hashtag has been used more than 30 million times on Instagram.
10. Coca-Cola: Share a Coke
Remember that summer when you could walk into a store and pick up a Coca-Cola with your name on it (literally)?
That was part of the Share a Coke campaign, where Coca-Cola printed various names on its labels instead of its brand name and invited its audience to “Share a Coke with” whoever’s name was on the bottle.
Like many other campaigns on this list, this was not purely a social media play. However, as people excitedly scanned grocery shelves for the names of their friends and family on Coke bottles, they also reshared the content online when they found one.
The campaign garnered hundreds of thousands of impressions across social media and, most importantly, increased the brand’s revenue by 11% over the previous year.
Now it’s time to launch your own winning social media campaign
You’ve seen how it’s done; now it’s your turn.
A well-designed social media campaign can likely support whatever marketing initiative you’re working on. Whether you’re making an exciting announcement about a new product or aiming to increase your brand awareness or the number of incoming leads, you can leverage a unified social campaign to help achieve your goals.
The post 10 Creative Social Media Campaign Examples to Learn From appeared first on LocaliQ.
