Companies are becoming more skilled and creative in their social media usage. Social media is no longer just for keeping friends connected but it is connecting companies with customers. We have seen some pretty impressive social campaigns this year, but there are four notable campaigns worth mentioning in terms of social media platform choice, creativity, and engagement.
Subway #JanuANY
Subway launched its #JanuANY campaign in January 2014 to promote all of its footlongs being $5. For anyone who tweeted using the hashtag #JanuANY, Subway would reply in real-time with a caption and GIF. Subway partnered with Giphy and 360i, known social content producers, and renowned digital artists to come up with artful GIFs. Not only was this campaign entertaining and promotional, but it took advantage of the GIF trend. It had customers sharing these creative GIFs all over social media..
Chevrolet Purple Your Profile
Chevrolet launched its Purple Your Profile campaign in February 2014. The purpose of this campaign was to celebrate cancer survivors and raise awareness for cancer. For each person who purpled his or her profile, Chevrolet would donate $1 up to $1 million. Chevrolet built an easy-to-use website where people could upload profile pictures they wanted to purple. On its website, Chevrolet also encouraged participants to donate money to the American Cancer Society or to volunteer their time through Road to Recovery program, a program that facilitates rides for cancer patients. This campaign resulted in 1.3 million people changing their profile picture on Facebook and 700,000 on Twitter.
Coca-Cola Share a Coke
Perhaps the most well-known campaign of this year was Coca-Cola’s Share a Coke campaign. While this campaign was first launched in Australia in 2011, it was renewed in the UK and launched for the first time in the US during the summer of 2014. This campaign replaced the Coke logo script on bottles and cans with popular first names or names of endearment. For this campaign, Coke capitalized on the self-expression and the sharing on social media trends. This campaign has spread to 70 countries. In the UK alone, 150+ million personalized bottles were sold, and there were 989 million Twitter impressions.
Marc Jacobs #CastMeMarc
Marc Jacobs launched this campaign in the spring of 2014 to find models for their Fall/Winter 2014 collection. They turned to Instagram and Twitter and asked model hopefuls to send in photos using the hashtag #CastMeMarc. The Marc Jacobs team scanned through the over 70,000 photos flooding in to choose nine winners. This campaign was so successful that it was renewed to cast models for next year’s Fall/Winter 2015 line. The second time around there were over 100,000 photo submissions and 11 winners were chosen from that batch.
There you have it. The best campaigns of 2014. Let’s see what 2015 has to bring!