A lot happened in the Social Media world in 2012, especially when it comes to campaigns run by well known companies. Here are 5 of my favourite social media campaigns from 2012.
1. Nike at the Olympics
The Olympics was heavily documented in every country all over the world. Because of this, almost every single person knew that the official sponsor for the London 2012 was Adidas. This, however didn't stop Nike. With massive billboards around London, their #MakeItCount campaign went viral. This campaign featured 11 athletes in three countries showing how they "make it count" by pushing their boundaries.
Not only did Nike have the "make it count" campaign, they also used #findgreatness to counteract the millions of pounds Adidas spent on #takethestage.
Reports showed that more than 16,000 tweets associated the word Nike with the word Olympic compared to 9,295 for Adidas. Furthermore, Nike attracted 166,718 new facebook fans versus Adidas's meer 80,761.
2. Cadbury
Cadbury is always one of the first well known companies to turn to Social Media to attract attention and their way of celebrating 1M Facebook fans was no different. When Cadbury realised that only 16% of their fans saw their content they posted on Facebook they wanted to increase the engagement among their fans.
As a test to see what their users would engage with, Cadbury decided to build a giant Facebook 'like' thumb out of pieces of Dairy Milk.
They used teaser ads to build up to the event and then live streamed from a studio with user-generated content and photos. The Cadbury team also responded to comments made by fans in the video.
As a result of this great Social Media campaign, Cadbury gained 40,000 Facebook fans and had around 350,000 actively involved in the campaign.
3. Prometheus #areyouseeingthis
When the new Century Fox movie, Prometheus came to our cinema, there was a Social Media campaign successfully running with the help of Channel 4 and Zeebox. A three minute trailer was released online and on Channel 4 and Zeebox simultaniously where viewers were encouraged to tweet with the hashtag #areyouseeingthis.
Following trend, Channel 4 screened a 40 second capture of viewers tweets. Reports showed that there was a spike in activity with around 4,000 tweets and the campaign potentially reaching around 15m users. Ironically, the disappointing part of this whole campaign was the movie itself.
4. Heinz Facebook Quiz
Heinz is a brand that uses social to constantly build excitement around its products. As part of a new Five Beanz variety, Heinz created a Facebook quiz app that would tell its users, based on their answers what kind of bean they had grown up to become. As an encouragement to share the quiz, Heinz picked five winners every hour and sent a personalised bean. They also gave a goodie bag to every user that invited 10 people to take the quiz along with offering Facebook fans a coupon so they could try the product.
The campaign ran for two weeks showing that over 22,000 people took part in the quiz and more than 10,000 users shared the app. The campaign also reached 10.8M people on Facebook and over 3M people outside of Facebook and Twitter. Overall, the two week quiz helped Heinz grow their Facebook community by over 30,000 fans.
5. #BullyMovie
A documentary was created called "Bully" which showed childhood bullying at its worst. The goal of the campaign was to drive awareness and build a community against bullying. They set themselves the task of creating an organic trending topic (#BullyMovie) in one day. This means 1 million tweets were needed, containing the hashtag to make it trend on Twitter.
The core message of the film was that 13 million children in America were being bullied each year with three million of those children avoiding school because of bullying.
With the help of a 17 year old high school student Katy Butler, her community grew to nearly 500,000 and helped #BullyMovie achieve 1 Million tweets in a 24-hour period.
Mentioned above are 5 well known brands. This doesn't mean that small businesses aren't running great social media campaigns, it just means that they aren't getting the same exposure. Remember, the likes of Nike, Heinz and Cadbury all started off as a small business.