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5 Great Social Media Campaigns To Inspire Your 2016 Marketing Strategy

2015 is coming to an end, and it is time to look back and determine what we can learn from social media analytics for the next year. For all brands that want to improve their social media marketing in 2016, here are five great campaign strategies across a variety of platforms selected just for you.

Want to track the success of your own campaigns? Try our free social media campaign tracker.

#Happytohelp: Using Social Listening to Improve Customer Experience… and Beyond

In October 2014, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines managed to turn the traveler’s renowned habit of complaining on social media about their airline experience into a very successful customer care campaign under the hashtag #happytohelp.

Using social listening, the airline carrier tracked the issues travelers were having during their trip for half a year (not only their own, but also those of their competitors) and used these social insights to prepare a command center to answer these problems in real time for five full days, all over the world and around the clock. The initiative was widely popular, with over 36 million impressions in just five days, and an avalanche of tweets mentioning the campaign.

 

 

Happy to help tweet

Aside from the retrieval of passports or forgotten luggage, the help center missions included singing a lullaby to a passenger struggling with jetlag, or helping a young traveler to get through a five-hour delay with a personal message from her favorite boyband!

As demonstrated in our Airlines on Social Media case study, KLM has maintained its commanding presence on social media in 2015. This summer, it was both the most discussed airline in Europe with a 15.2% share of voice, and the most responsive on Twitter with a 90% response rate.

 

Airlines Response Rate Twitter

 Discover our case study on the World’s top 40 Airlines and their social media strategy

Dior catches Fire on Instagram

Disclaimer: We will not talk about Star Wars, because there has just been too much discussion about it in social marketing circles over recent weeks. Yet surfing the social buzz of a movie release has been a winning marketing strategy for several brands this year.

Dior was particularly successful in leveraging the buzz of the last instalment of the Hunger Games Series. The French fashion giant published several shots of Jennifer Lawrence on Instagram, the actress playing the central character Katniss Everdeen, at movie premieres all over the world sporting beautiful Dior dresses.

In just a few days, the brand’s Instagram account gained hundreds of thousands of followers from all over the world. Dior’s Instagram post of Lawrence at the Hunger Games world premiere remains one of its most popular posts with over 131,000 likes and over 1,100 comments, well above the volume of engagement generated by other prestigious ambassadors of the brand such as Benedict Cumberbatch or Rihanna.

 

Hunger Games actress in Dior

 #LikeAGirl : The Power of Inspiration… And a Great Hashtag

In 2014, the feminine product brand Always launched its iconic #LikeAGirl video campaign, which criticized the social norms which limit the confidence of women. If you’ve watched it, you’ll probably agree that this ad feels like a documentary or an activist video, which makes it incredibly easy to forget that it is indeed just that: an ad trying to promote a specific product.

Yet the formula worked so well across social media platforms that the brand launched a second instalment last summer, under the ambitious title “Unstoppable” but with the same premise and winning hashtag. Once again, Always hit it out of the park: in September alone, #LikeAGirl appeared over 17,200 times on social media, with 180,000 engagements on a global scale.

 

Like A Girl Always

Even today, months after the launch of ‘Unstoppable’, and over a year after the original campaign, the hashtag has become part of online sports culture and still racked up almost 18,000 mentions on social media in the last thirty days, according to Talkwalker’s hashtag tracking IQ app.

 

hashtag-tracking-#LikeAGirl

Mentions,  potential reach and engagement for the #Likeagirl hashtag over the last thirty days

#AdidasNeo: Involve your Brand Ambassadors

In Dior’s case, Lawrence was merely the face of the French fashion brand. Adidas took it a step further and decided to make a celebrity the main focus of their social media campaign: for the launch of its AdidasNeo collection, the brand recruited the famous singer and actress Selena Gomez and her 30 million+ Twitter followers.

On her account, Gomez shared pictures of herself sporting her favorite Adidas items and called on her fans to get involved in the campaign in exchange for signed items. Her most popular #AdidasNeo tweet generated over 17,000 retweets!

 

Selena Gomez Adidas Neo 2

 

Top three posts for the #AdidasNeo campaign in terms of engagement

 

Snapchat: The New App for Original Brand Campaigning

This last section is less about one social media campaign, and more about the tool that enabled these amazing campaigns to succeed. During the year 2015, more and more brands have turned to Snapchat to develop new social media campaigns.


Snapchat

What are the advantages of Snapchat over other social networks such as Twitter or Instagram? According to Business Insider, over 71% of Snapchat users in the US are under the age of 34, including 45% between the age of 18 & 24, which makes the app the social network with the youngest audience, far ahead of its nearest competitors Vine and Tumblr. Also, the ephemeral nature of Snapchat posts force users to focus on the message and react immediately.

The American Football League (NFL) is one of the front-runners of these Snapchat campaigns. With the start of the its official season at the beginning of December, the organization recently became a privileged partner as the first sports brand having access to the application's Explorer feature. The new partnership allows fans to experience each featured game through multiple points of views, thanks to pictures and footage posted by other fans and the NFL staff on the platform.

Snapchat social media campaigns can also be very simple. In Canada, the Valentine Restaurants used the Quebec National Day to launch a 48-hour campaign calling on users to send them on Snapchat a selfie with a fleur-de-lis, the symbol of Quebec, to receive in exchange a coupon for two free hotdogs in their restaurants.

 

snapchat valentine

The Valentine Restaurants promoted their Snapchat campaign across social media platforms

 

Get Ready for 2016

As illustrated by these very innovative campaigns, social listening can help you understand the dynamics of social media and improve the efficiency of your posts. Keep up-to-date with the latest trends in social media marketing by reading more of our articles on the Talkwalker blog!

CTAHTEN

Banner image credit: CC/Flickr/Jason Howie (picture was resized)

Snapchat image credit: CC/Flickr/AdamPrzezdziek (text was added to original image)


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