Top 10 social media campaigns that went viral this year!

As we prepare for a brand New Year ahead, plenty of exciting social media campaigns are doing the rounds and some have been really powerful in engaging audiences so far! Social media marketing campaigns can be tough in view of today’s media-saturated landscape but many companies with just a single viral campaign have gained remarkable success in creating brand awareness and engaging people with the brand! A clever social marketing campaign improves audiences’ insight and boosts brand visibility by hitting the right spot. Let us take a look at 10 top-notch social media marketing campaigns on different social platforms that went viral this year, and what made them click.

• Last selfie campaign on Snapchat: Winner of 2015 Webby awards, this intelligent viral campaign of World Wildlife Fund brought to the forefront the risk of the endangered animal population to the world and got immense sympathy from animal lovers globally. As per Ittisa, a digital media agency, ‘the whole idea behind WWF using Snapchat was to emphasize the fact that endangered species are disappearing around the world just as selfies disappear from Snapchat in 10 seconds’’. Beautifully correlating the disappearance of selfies in Snapchat every 10 seconds with fading of endangered species created attention, engaged audience emotionally, excellently utilized creativity with a strong message for WWF. Result, the company managed the month’s donation in just three days of launching the campaign.

 

• Groupons Banana Bunker Campaign on Facebook: Groupon made a spectacular campaign on Facebook in March this year while promoting a unique product called Banana Bunker. It’s one of the best online advertising campaigns for Groupon which took the cake! Most of the leading news sources like Mashable, Adweek, and Buzzfeed reports that this campaign immediately became a viral hit selling the coveted product right away! Groupon knew exactly whats coming their way so they kept an in-house team ready to turn the product into effective engagement and sales. Their casual one to one approach, effective handling of consumer conversation with a tinge of humor on Facebook made this campaign an instant success!

• GoPro’s Skateboarding Cat Campaign: With incredible success, GoPro, the adventure camera maker, launched this online advertising campaign in Australia on Instagram (and YouTube) this year! According to Lux Narayan, CEO Unmetric, this video earned the highest engagement score on Unmetric with 250, 000 likes and huge amount of shares. To quote Narayan, ‘’In this case, the authentic nature of a consumer-generated video, coupled with the Web’s obsession with cats aloofly doing funny things, was the perfect recipe for a viral video’’. GoPro has rightly utilized user-generated content in their marketing strategy for this campaign.

• Like a Girl Unstoppable Campaign on Twitter: One of the top social campaigns in our list, this powerful commercial of Always on feminine products earned over 85 million views from 150+ countries with 30 million in the very first week of its release on twitter. The campaign talks about society’s unreasonable expectations from girls/women and the way it limits their actions, especially during puberty. This intelligent campaign compels an individual to think on an issue from a different perspective. It talks to women of different age group so we can clearly understand where things actually start getting wrong. International personalities like Melinda Gates, Sarah Silverman and Chelsea Clinton retweeted the video with a smashing hit winning D&AD Black Pencil award!

• Squatty Potty on YouTube:

A brilliant marketing campaign, Squatty Potty LLC, shows the world how a creative marketing campaign can help an ordinary product like a ‘’toilet stool’’ to get 10 million views in just two months of its launch and become the number one best seller in Amazon’s Toilet Training Potties & Seats category. Here we get to see a colorful video with a comical and non-confrontational approach and a cute unicorn pooping ice-cream. The company talks about a very common and everyday affair at its creative best!

• Toms Shoes “One day without shoes” Campaign on Instagram: Another example of a successful social media campaign that gained immense success this year. Ecommerce vendor TOMS Shoes celebrated their nine-year anniversary with this cool philanthropic digital marketing campaign on May this year. For every Instagram post of bare feet with hashtag #withoutshoes, the company donated a pair of shoes to a needy child. The company got massive brand awareness with 2 million followers in Instagram and 65 percent engagement rate. This innovative effort helped everyone to donate without making an actual purchase. To quote Blake Mycoskie, TOMS Founder, ‘’this charitable act was an opportunity to do something good without having to buy.”

• Cooperative Insurance Nostalgia FM: Cooperative Insurance got some fantastic response by launching what went on to become one of its most successful social media campaigns with a sudden rise of 35,000 website visitors. Nostalgia FM, an interactive tool was kind of a time machine that allowed users to get a list of numbers or tracks which became popular at the time when the user had first passed his/her driving test. Within five days of the initiation of this campaign, business showed 200,000 engagements in twitter and Facebook. Twitter followers increased by 6% and 15000 people used the app within 24 hours of its launch. To quote Charles Offord, Managing Director at the Cooperative Insurance “The results of the campaign have exceeded our expectations and we are pleased that so many people had fun reminiscing about their past driving experiences. This was a valuable learning project for us as we continue to progress our transformation journey and we will build on the success of this campaign to continue to engage with our customers and members in new and appealing ways’’.

• Epic Estonia: The travel ministry of Estonia took tourism to new heights with their smart creative ‘’Epic Estonia’’ Campaign. Estonia is a lesser known European destination. To promote something which many people aren’t quite acquainted with, needs out of the box thinking! With a series of 90+ attractive videos tagged #EpicEstonia, the effort showcased the spectacular side of Estonia starting right from scuba diving in underwater prison to exciting rooftop tours. Turning Estonia into an exotic travel destination, this campaign helped the blog of the tourism company to get good number of followers, visitors, Facebook engagement, shares and memorable hashtags.

• Nest Cams Magic of Home Campaign: Nest Cam, manufacturer of home security cameras, thermostats and fire alarms made an innovative social media marketing by showing a real person’s home with Nest Cams camera in action. Furthermore, this effort makes easy for consumers to picture it in their home before making a purchase. The video is humorous yet succeeded in grabbing the attention of potential customers with a whopping 12 million Google page views and 603.8 thousand followers.

• Oreo’s SnacksHacks Campaign on Vine: A great way to have fun and learn something exciting at the same time, Oreo used Vine to make interesting videos that’ll compel people to eat more Oreos in refreshingly new ways! The videos provide step-by-step guide on making different lip smacking recipes with Oreo being an important ingredient. Result, 55.9 thousand followers on Vine and over 3 million video loops.

So what we get to learn? We cannot force a particular post to go viral after all. If you look deep into the marketing strategies of the aforesaid companies, you’ll see that most of them are not trying too hard to win attention, but they have made a great effort to churn out an innovative idea and execute the same to strike a chord with their target audience. An original idea that truly engages people is the trick that one should look for. Be it a video or an article, a charitable act or an engaging activity, if people like it, they’ll share it for sure. Most of all, a lot of hard work and resources are engaged to dish out an intelligent and convincing social media campaign. So research your market, study your audience and think out-of-the-box.

Let us know which have been among your best digital media campaigns so far that helped you establish your brand among your audience, or if you came across a social media campaign that influenced you to try a new product.