Running a social media campaign that stands out takes a hefty dose of creativity. The social waters are getting deeper, wider, and more crowded with every passing year. This makes it hard for brands to create content that gets noticed and achieves its purpose.
The remedy? Just look at some of the top social media campaigns of 2022 to get inspired. What about these social media content ideas makes them so influential? What did these brands do well? How can your brand improve on them?
Use this list to spark your social marketing strategy and start creating campaigns that work.
Table of Contents:
What Is a Social Media Campaign?
How Do Social Media Campaigns Work?
Top Social Media Campaigns of 2022
What Is a Social Media Campaign?
Let’s start with a definition. What is a social media campaign, anyway?
It’s a lot like any type of marketing campaign: a planned series of events over a specific period of time designed to achieve a certain outcome that can be tracked and measured.
Unlike marketing campaigns that can apply to any number or variety of channels, social media marketing campaigns are specific to social media. Effective social media marketing takes into account each platform’s unique audience, features, and functions and builds the campaign around them.
How Do Social Media Campaigns Work?
Social media campaigns are a slice of a larger social media content marketing strategy. You use content to increase SEO, attract leads, promote products and services, and market your business.
A social media campaign is a granular content marketing tool designed to achieve a specific goal. Instead of creating just any type of content, your content should directly relate to the campaign. It’s more specific and focused, especially when you consider all the different layers of social media that must be taken into account.
Every social media marketing campaign begins with a purpose. For example, you might join a new social network and run a brand awareness campaign to ramp up your follower count. Or you might be launching a new product and want to run a social media campaign to raise awareness or sales. Use these goals to come up with social media content ideas that will help you reach your objectives.
From there, marketers will come up with social media post ideas to spread the word and achieve their goals. This might be custom images with the brand’s logo, quotes from a company leader, facts or stats from recent research, or ad copy that intrigues the reader, for example.
After creating content for social media, you’ll decide where and when to post it. Which platforms will you post on? What time will you post content? How long will you post content around this specific goal or topic?
Last but not least, you should plan to track your social media posts using a social media monitoring tool like Meltwater. See how users engage with and respond to each post. Compare engagement metrics to specific actions, such as purchases, audience growth, or media mentions to see whether you achieved your campaign goals.
The benefits of social media campaigns cannot be overstated. They help brands to align with innovation and creativity. When done well, they can lead to tons of user-generated content that will help even more people enjoy your content.
Top Social Media Campaigns of 2022
Inspiring your social media content strategy is as easy as looking at what other successful brands are doing. You never know where your next social media content ideas will come from.
Here are some of our favorite social media campaign examples from 2022 and what you can learn from them:
1. Twitter’s If You Can Dream It, Tweet It Campaign
2. KFC’s #UnboringMornings
3. Firehouse Subs Rewards Week
4. Reddit’s Super Bowl Awareness Campaign
5. #Barbiecore
6. McDonald’s Menu Hacks Campaign
7. Oscar Meyer Bologna Face Masks
8. Spotify Wrapped Campaign
9. _Folk_lor Weekly Product Drops
10. Scent & Fire’s Twosday Campaign
1. Twitter’s If You Can Dream It, Tweet It Campaign
Social media mainstay Twitter took to an omnichannel format with its If You Can Dream It, Tweet It campaign.
They featured inspirational billboards of celebrities and Twitter users who shared their career and life goals on the platform, then made them come true. Users were pictured alongside their Tweets to share their dreams at scale and inspire others to follow suit.
Taking an emotional approach to brand awareness, especially at a time when Twitter’s financials looked dismal, is key to driving action amongst a user base. There was no push to join the platform or spend money on Twitter ads, which helped to give the campaign staying power and make it so impactful.
Tip: Learn how to create your own Twitter marketing strategy, how to use Twitter Analytics, and get into Twitter management for beginners to boost your next Twitter campaign.
2. KFC’s #UnboringMornings
While millions of people head to KFC for lunch or dinner each day, it’s not the first restaurant that comes to mind for breakfast. KFC aims to change this with its #UnboringMorning campaign.
The hashtag accompanies a series of quirky videos and contests that are lightyears away from ordinary, such as a commute to work in a sidecar.
The foods themselves aren’t your typical fast-food offerings, either — treats like the KFC Chizza are bound to start your day on a high note.
3. Firehouse Subs Rewards Week
Firehouse Subs hosted a social media Rewards Week as a way to earn customer loyalty, drum up donations for fire rescue teams, and drive signups and redemptions via its app.
Each day of Rewards Week, the brand posted a hint where users could find bonus points to add to their accounts. When they found a code, they could add their points via the app. The fun, interactive social media post ideas generated exposure for some of the restaurant’s fan-favorite sandwiches along with plenty of website traffic from fans hunting for bonus points.
4. Reddit’s Super Bowl Awareness Campaign
Super Bowl ad spots were going for $6.5 million for 30-second ads. While many brands have been willing to pay more for longer ads, Reddit took a different approach with its blink-and-you’ll-miss-it brand awareness ad. It starts like any other car commercial, then cuts to an image of the Reddit logo, followed by galloping horses in a field. It was an odd way to grab attention — and it totally worked.
The ad drove users to social media as they tried to figure out what they just witnessed. A follow-up Tweet explaining the ad racked up more than 464,000 views following the commercial.
5. #Barbiecore
America’s favorite plastic icon is getting a movie, and the highly anticipated film has led to a resurgence of all things pretty and pink.
The #Barbiecore trend is making its way into high fashion, including campaigns from Valentino and Jimmy Choo. Celebrities and influencers across social media are showing their support for the film and its iconic star.
With the film set to hit the theaters in July 2023, social media is likely to continue seeing a surge in sequins, tulle, glitter, high heels, and neon to keep the buzz and hype alive.
6. McDonald’s Menu Hacks Campaign
Secret menus and menu hacks have enthralled social media users for years. They find ways to save money on their favorite items at Starbucks or Chick-Fil-A or get exposed to tasty items they wouldn’t think to order themselves.
McDonald’s cashed in on the trend in 2022 in their social media content strategy. The result: their own set of menu hacks that combined two or more favorites into a single meal.
These Frankenstein-type offerings included chicken nugget burgers, a double cheeseburger with a Filet-o-Fish, a sausage egg McMuffin with a hashbrown layer, and a Big Mac, McChicken, and Filet-o-Fish mashup.
What makes the ad campaign unique is that McDonald’s took data directly from its most ardent social media fans to create these one-of-a-kind monstrosities. These offerings were developed based on user comments and the way they combine various McDonald’s offerings post-purchase. The ad campaign has garnered tons of positive press. The food combinations? Not so much.
7. Oscar Meyer Bologna Face Masks
Yes, you read that right. But the good news is that these meaty-looking face masks aren’t made with real bologna. Oscar Meyer ventured into territory it had never dared to go before – skin care.
The product gave a nod to the nostalgia trend of the 1980s and 1990s. Bologna sandwiches were gourmet meals for kids who grew up in these decades, and often they would turn real bologna slices into pseudo-face masks by tearing out holes for the eyes and mouth.
Also worth noting, the Oscar Meyer-branded masks are NOT edible.
8. Spotify Wrapped Campaign
Spotify has prided itself on helping users discover new music and artists that speak to them.
Its recent Wrapped social media marketing campaign builds on this sentiment by creating personalized playlists based on each person’s streaming habits throughout the past year. Users could click through a colorful collection of slides to see more of their favorite artists, songs, podcasts, and more.
The campaign earned more than 60 million shares from 90 million users. It’s become something of an annual tradition among its core user base that fans look forward to each year.
9. _Folk_lor Weekly Product Drops
Secondhand jewelry brand Folklor provides an ongoing treasure hunt for jewelry aficionados.
The brand is continually sourcing pieces from vintage stores and other places to find the best pre-loved pieces. To generate interest and showcase their ever-changing selection, the brand uses Instagram to reveal weekly product drops.
This keeps their audience hooked and always in tune to see what’s new. It keeps the idea of the treasure hunt alive, making it a highly effective social media campaign example.
10. Scent & Fire’s Twosday Campaign
A great example of on-brand social media marketing, eco-conscious candle company Scent & Fire promoted their brand and products with the intention for a 2/2/2022 campaign. They leveraged this once-in-a-lifetime date to promote their Manifest and Abundance candles to an audience most likely to care about the significance of the date.
These social media campaign examples are just the tip of the iceberg. How will you use them to inspire your social marketing strategy? For help developing your next campaign and making the most of your social media marketing, contact Meltwater today.
