Social Media Campaigns

Billboards, newspaper ads, magazine ads, those are all good tools to market and start a campaign. However, these days, when looking for a younger audience, you’d be hard pressed to find something that works as well as a social media campaign.

Social media campaigns take place across any social media platforms you may choose, but the three you probably want to leverage most are Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Obviously, you can include others like Pinterest, Tumblr, Blogger, WordPress, etc., whatever those may be. We feel there are some things to keep in mind when working this kind of campaign. Let’s examine Old Spice’s immensely successful social media campaign:

Give them something to share

Your product might be the best on the market or, if you’re speaking with humility, it might not be. Either way, you need to give your intended audience something to share via social media. Whether that’s an image, a hashtag, or a video (as with Old Spice’s “The Man You Could Smell Like” commercials), you have to give your audience some snackable content. Something they can look at during work and laugh, something they’ll show their friends on their phone or even post to their Facebook wall.

It’s not that you interact, it’s how you interact

With social media, it is very important how you talk to the people who “like” you, your followers, or whoever is watching and commenting on your video. However, it is also important to consider the way in which you do this. Who are you going to notice more at work? The guy who grunts “Good morning” to you, or the guy who says that cheerfully, asks how your day is, and then tells you a joke. You all know about the “The Man You Could Smell Like” commercials and if you watch the video we just linked to previously you’ll see that it has 43 million views to date. Which is astounding because it means people are seeing it on TV and then watching it over and over again online.

What’s more important is that Old Spice took things a step further and took questions from Twitter fans and then launched response videos also featuring “The Man You Could Smell Like”. Here are the stats from this response campaign:

On Day 1, the campaign received almost 6 million views (more than President Obama’s victory speech)
On Day 3, the campaign had surpassed 20 million views and 40 million after the first week
Twitter interaction increased 2700% for Old Spice
Facebook interaction was up 800%
Oldspice.com traffic was up 300%
The OldSpice YouTube channel became the all-time most viewed channel
After 3 months, sales were up 55%
Old Spice became the #1 body wash brand for men

Amazing, right? All because they thought about how they could best interact with their fans.

Presentation

So Old Spice has a new brand, now they have to make sure it’s consistent. Here are images from their current Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube pages:

Notice the consistency? Most people don’t realize it, but there is a way to make design a key element of social media campaigns. Yes, interaction is the most important thing, but you also want to keep your brand recognizable and consistent across social media platforms.

There are detractors out there who will tell you not to trust the ROI of social media campaigns and their are people who try them and fail and say they don’t work as a result. However, as we can see from this Old Spice campaign, the ROI can be unlimited and that if they’re organized correctly and meticulously, they can enhance your brand in a way you never thought possible.