Powerful Social Media Campaign Ideas To Steal?

Social media is now evolving at a faster pace than ever..

As a result, many small businesses fail at social media marketing. Because you can’t succeed unless you always adapt to latest trends to make your brand relevant in different social networks.

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According to Brandwatch, 71% of people who talk about brands on social networks don’t actually follow the pages of those brands on social media.

Why? Because you can’t expect people to find your profile and content on their own. You need to reach out and make your content discoverable.

Have a look and see how some of the big brands and businesses use innovative ways to get the user’s attention.

1. Add Two-Spoons Of Humor

Deadpool made history when it premiered in 2016, making it one of the highest grossing R-rated movies ever made. The marketing team behind the movie is actually the true force behind that success.

The creative social media campaigns were the main reason this movie became such a huge success. The dark, twisted, and bold humor used in their content is what got people’s attention. Every video clip, poster, and even the billboards they’ve created went viral on social media.

Related Article: Comedy In Your Social Media Marketing?

This funny emoji billboard actually received more attention on social media than it did in real-life.

There’s no greater superpower than making someone laugh. Add some humor to your social media posts to make your followers fall in love with you.

2. Build Hype With Behind The Scenes Content

There’s a reason why movie makers release behind-the-scenes footage of their movies before the movie release. People love to see how movies get made and how their favorite actors work. This help build more hype for the movie.

This is also a clever strategy used by many brands. Taking people behind-the-scenes of a product creation is a brilliant way to show people the human side of your company and also show how much work and quality goes into producing your products.

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L’Oreal is one of those companies that leverage this strategy.

The company encourages its employees to share their work experiences on social media using the hashtag #LifeatLoreal.

As a result, the company managed to built trust by showing the world that there are actual humans working at their offices.

3. Take Advantage Of Current Trends

Keeping your business pages updated with fresh and timely content is another great strategy to engage with your audience. ALS ice bucket challenge is one of those popular trends that took over the internet in 2014.

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Many companies, including McDonald's, Samsung, Energizer, and Old Spice took advantage of this trend to develop videos and social media posts to promote their brand and to raise awareness for ALS.

4. Take A Stand

Most businesses like to play it safe when it comes to important issues. Because taking a side often means you lose business from the other side.

Not necessarily. Sometimes, taking a side can help generate more buzz for your business and boost sales. By showing the world that you care about important causes, your brand will build more trust and recognition.

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Feminine product company, Always took a bold stand to stop the bullying of girls with their Always #LikeAGirl campaign.

After 3 years, this campaign is still being shared and talked about in social media.

5. Team Up With Influencers

Working together with influencers is an effective way to reach and promote your business to new and target audiences. Getting your message across to people by someone they already trust will make your campaigns even more successful.

This is the main reason why influencer marketing is considered one of the most effective social media promotional strategies available today.

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Hallmark is one of the many brands that use influencer marketing to promote its product campaigns. In 2022, the company ran a successful social media campaign partnering with family-friendly influencers to promote its new line of holiday-themed products.

6. Build A ChatBot

Facebook Messenger chatbots offer an easy and an engaging way for small businesses to connect with their customers and followers. Instead of waiting for a real person to come online and answer customer questions, bots provided instant and effective customer support.

Lyft, Spotify, Mastercard, Whole Foods, Starbucks, and many others use chatbots to engage with their followers. HealthTap also has a chatbot that provides instant health tips to its followers.

Related Article: How To Brand Your Business And Make Money Online?

You don’t need any programming experience to create a Facebook chatbot. You can easily create one for free using a service like ChatFuel.

Related: With Mobile Monkey you can build powerful chatbots for Facebook Messenger easy and FREE with no coding required.

7. Host Giveaway Contests

Running a giveaway contest is another easy way to get people to share your content and generate buzz for your business at low cost, even when you don’t have a lot of followers on your page.

Women’s fashion brand, Stella & Dot occasionally run giveaway contests through its social media channels to grow their following and build awareness for their products.

Guest Authored By Syed Balkhi. Syed is an an award-winning young entrepreneur and a public speaker. He was recognized as the top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 30 by the United Nations. He is the founder of WPBeginner, the largest WordPress resource site as well as List25, a popular entertainment site with over 2.2 Million YouTube subscribers and over 500 million video views. Syed also co-founded several popular softwares including OptinMonster, Envira Gallery, SoliloguyWP, WPForms, and MonsterInsights. Follow Syed on Twitter.

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Over To You

When it comes to social media, it’s unlikely for one successful strategy to work again.

Many people tried to follow Deadpool and create humorous social media campaigns. Several other organizations and celebrities tried to copy ALS ice bucket challenge, none of them made an impact.

You need to find your own innovative ideas to make a true impact. So, take inspiration from these examples and craft your own viral social media campaigns. Who knows, maybe your campaign will get featured in one of our future posts.." -Syed Balkhi

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  Post Crafted By:

  Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at YourWorldBrand.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Scottsdale, AZ. I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)

Comedy In Your Social Media Marketing?

Having a sense of humor can help your brand standout exponentially. Nothing delivers connection and meaning faster than making someone laugh..

As comedian Louis CK notes, "The goal of comedy is to just laugh, which is a really high-hearted thing, (about) visceral connection and reaction."

In addition to comedy, C.K. knows a thing or two about branding and marketing. Advertising Age ranked him at the top of their "Digital A-List" in 2012 for rethinking how artists interact with their fans. A recent Nielsen study found that 47 percent of global respondents said that humorous ads resonated the most.

Why Humor Helps

For scrappy businesses, "Humor can help you stand out in a crowded world," says Tim Washer, creative director at Cisco. In this role, Washer produces hilarious videos for the B2B software brand including a popular ad introducing a new server as the ideal Valentine's Day gift. ("Nothing says I love you like six times the mobile backhaul capacity.")

In rolling out their new mail-order service, Dollar Shave Club needed to cut through the clutter of the billion-dollar razor industry. They did so with a hilarious 90-second video that offers a mix of on-target product benefits conveyed in a distinct brand voice.

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Forty-eight hours after the video's debut on YouTube, Dollar Shave Club was laughing all the way to the bank with 12,000 people signed up for their service.

There's no limit to who can use humor. You aren't bound by size, industry, budget or any other constraint. So how do you get started?

Start with the Right People

BarkBox has a lot of fun with their marketing. For an example, check out their posts on #HumpDay - which takes on new meaning when your business is dog products. So how do they do it?

"I don't find myself to be the funniest person in the room. But because of that, I've only hired people on my team who are genuinely funny" says Stacie Grissom, Bark & Co's editor-in-chief. "Humor is something that needs to come naturally. And if it doesn't come naturally to you - find someone to help you out."

Create a role like Cisco did or simply hire for humor. Bottom line - surround yourself with the right people.

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How to Tell Funny (Brand) Stories

Most comedy tells stories. As such, many of those same story elements are critical in telling a funny story for your brand.

I Plot - Kurt Vonnegut famously called them"story shapes" but ultimately there are only a few different common plots out there. What kind of story are you trying to tell?

I Character - Your main character shouldn't be your brand - it should be about your audience.

l Conflict - Most comedy comes from pain. In many cases your customers are in pain and you can help them. Humor allows you to explore this by casting pain in a comedic light.

We weren't laughing at the "Where's the beef?" lady in the Wendy's ads. We were laughing with her at the sad state of the fast-food hamburger.

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l Voice - Humor has to fit your brand voice. For years, Charmin embraced a family friendly voice in talking about bathroom business. That's why they regularly use scatological puns and the hashtag #tweetfromtheseat to weigh in on current events and pop culture but still in a G-rated context.

"I don't think there's any brand that shouldn't be funny," says Eric Munn of Onion Labs, the content services division of the venerable comedy brand, The Onion, which works with brands such as Audi, Bacardi, and Overstock to create engaging and humorous content on their platforms.

Surround yourself with funny people and use the tools of storytelling - archetypes, characters, conflict and voice - to find a way of embracing humor that fits for your brand. Go forth and be funny!

Guest Authored By Nick Westergaard. Nick is Founder and Chief Brand Strategist of Brand Driven Digital. He's a Speaker, Educator, Host of OnBrandPodcast and SocialBrand17 and Author of Get Scrappy. Follow Nick on Twitter.

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"Surround yourself with funny people and use the tools of storytelling - archetypes, characters, conflict and voice - to find a way of embracing humor that fits for your brand.

Go forth and be funny!"

• 

  Authored by:

  Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at GetMoreHere.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, Colorado. I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)

Follow Me Yonder..                     

Using Social Media To Become Famous For Nothing?

In 2006, I set out to brand myself. I had an idea that I shared with the owner of the small company at which I was employed. I called it "Publish or Perish," and despite the lack of originality, the idea was simple, but purposeful: We needed to elevate the name recognition of our company -- quickly..

The company had made a fortune working with a niche client, but unwisely, it chose to fly under the competition's radar. In other words, it did the opposite of marketing for fear that if competitors knew how much money it was making from this niche client, it would face stiffer competition. So naturally, after years of this "guerilla obfuscation," the niche client business dried up and now left the little-firm-that-couldn't struggling to sell its wares to prospects who knew nothing of our work, history and values, or even if we could deliver on our promises. Rapid marketing needed to be done.

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Publish, perish and politics.

With publish or perish, I argued, our team of very talented organizational designers, trainers and safety professionals would publish articles and thus get our name out there to get it associated with expertise in our industry. Well, my idea fell flat. A mousey woman with no actual marketing experience, education or aptitude had the top dog's ear and whispered sweet gibberish into it. Print publication was dead, she said, so were trade shows. The answer was social media. We needed a Facebook page, but most importantly we needed to blog.

I resisted, of course. I had no interest in blogging, which I still hold is, in the majority of cases, self-important dreck and a platform for those whose writing just isn't good enough for publication. (I feel even less beneficent toward self-published books; if it isn't eligible for academic and literary citation, I don't see any value to it, but hey that's just me.) At this point I might throw out a conciliatory "there are some top-shelf blogs out there..blah blah blah," but that's not my style. Good bloggers know when their work is good and don't need my validation. As for the rest of you, well if you read my statement about most blogs being dreck and thought I was talking about you, I probably was. Deal with it.

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Despite my protestations I was ordered to blog. I fought and threw a tantrum to no avail, so I finally acquiesced, on one condition: I would write what I wanted without anyone else having a say-so. I also managed to convince my leaders to allow me to submit abstracts and begin a public speaking campaign. I soon learned how to become famous for nothing by using social media, key words, the Google Search algorithm and press releases. Quickly I became the Brook Shields of Safety -- she's always been famous and has big bushy eyebrows, and no one can account for either -- I was famous for no apparent reason.

Press and public speaking.

I quickly learned that the true power of public speaking is the press before the event, promotion during the event and press after the event. At the time most of the major print magazines were scrambling for online content and had robots or interns using key word searches to get it. The Google algorithm leaned heavily on how many links a given post had (reasoning that the wider the distribution the more reliable and important the content).

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By using a free press release site and a handful of key words carefully and artfully woven in -- words like "aerospace" "automotive industry" and..well, false modesty prevents me from giving away all my secrets. Anyway, this site would blast my press release to publications looking for those key words and soon my press releases were on scores of pages, unread and unvetted. I was able to get my press releases, which had usually been run as articles, into minor and major business publications which I won't name because they are competitors of Entrepreneur (which by the way, never fell for this Machiavellian scheme of mine). Even today there are news outlets that aren't as judicious as they had ought to be. Fox News routinely posted my Entrepreneur articles, assuming that I was a conservative business writer, until someone eventually got around to actually reading my work, and it was unceremoniously removed from the site.

The PR service allowed me to Tweet the press release, share it on Facebook and post it to LinkedIn. I used to post the links separately to LinkedIn because that way I could post it as a discussion topic in all 50 groups to which I belonged.

For some reason, I keep getting thrown out of the groups on LinkedIn because many are run by the adult equivalent of the uptight high school girl who reached the pinnacle of her life and career by being voted third-runner-up for homecoming queen and alternate on student council. Such people ain't buying what I'm selling.

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It wasn't long before I was an annual speaker at the National Safety Council, until I pointed out that in my obnoxious estimation several of their perennial speakers were nothing but snake oil salesmen, an embarrassment to the profession. I don't burn my bridges, I dynamite them and pelt the repair crew with hot stones as they try to rebuild.

Posting and Peru.

It wasn't long before my blog following grew: I've always said I'm a bit like watching an abandoned warehouse fire. You're not glad that it's burning, but it's fun to watch the spectacle and nobody really gets hurt -- or, if they do get hurt they should have known better than to have been inside it to begin with.

I got a notice from WordPress that today is the seventh anniversary of my blog. It's actually older than that, but I put it on ice for a while when the owner of my company finally got around to reading it and insisted that I get it approved before publishing. As is my wont, I recommended he engage in congress with himself and offered interesting and inventive suggestions of where he might consider sticking his approval. This did not look good on my review.

On WordPress, I have posted in the neighborhood of 364,000 words, plus I have spoken at over a 100 international and local venues, including an address to an International Safety Conference on Mining in the Andes, in Lima, Peru. This despite my only knowledge of mining safety at the time was to stay the hell out of one. I have 167 works in print, and I was named by the largest safety magazine to both its list of "The Most Influential People Working in Safety" and "The Young (or Relatively Young) Up and Comers in Safety. "This despite the fact I'm not young. (I am often mistaken for being younger than I actually am because of my full head of hair, youthful skin and gross immaturity.)

Guest Authored By Phil La Duke. Phil is is a Safety Transformation Architect at Environmental Resources Management. An author, he writes about business, worker safety and organizational change topics on his blog. An avid user of social media for business. Follow Phil on Twitter.

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"The point I am yet again meandering around is that people try desperately and pathetically to use just one social network to build their personal brands when the true secret is to use all social media outlets as tools to get their brand out there, by using them holistically.

Oh, and it helps if you can write, if your message and style are distinctive, and if your brand is of interest.

Remember, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him think.."

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  Authored by:

  Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at GetMoreHere.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Los Angeles, CA where I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)

Follow Me Yonder..