Ten unique examples of twitter brand campaigns

Twitter July 22, 2011 3 Comments

With the number of people reached social media sites increasing, brands and companies are learning how to create campaigns that use the platform effectively. While sites like Facebook can utilitize the visual, advertising on Twitter is a greater challenge due to its limited space of 140 characters.

While there is the option of promoted tweets and users, not all can or want to go down this route. Yet the prospect of reaching out to 200 million users means that it’s becoming a more focused area for advertising.

Therefore the examples below are just some of the unique ways businesses and products have enhanced their product or service through Twitter. One of the constants that each campaign on offer has is that they interact and engage with users and is one of the reasons behind their success.

USA Today

Campaign: #AmericaWants

To measure the support for American charities, USA today ran the #AmericaWants campaign which lasted for four days. The campaign required users to tweet their favourite charity with the hashtag; the charity with the most tweets and retweets would receive a full page, colour advert in USA Today.

More than 60,000 tweets were made in support of more than 500 different organisations with the campaign reaching an estimated 67 million users on Twitter. People joined twitter just to partake in the campaign and many celebrities tweeted in support of their favourite charities. The charity that won the full page advert was ‘To Write Love on Her Arms,’ an anti-depression non-profit organization.

Bonafont

Campaign: Tweeting fridge
In Brazil, people don’t drink the recommended daily amount of water and Bonafont needed a way to get that message across. So they created the Tweeting Fridge, a fridge that tweets every time it’s opened or if the user doesn’t open it for a while where it then reminds them to drink.

How they ensured this was to give the fridge to a new celebrity every month (those who have a high number of followers) every month where they then use the regularly stocked fridge. Each fridge tweet contains a link to a website highlighting the importance of staying hydrated.

Uniqlo

Campaign: Twitter line & Virtual line campaign
Instead of just advertising their products and deals on twitter, Japanese clothes retailer, Uniqlo found a unique way of getting British shoppers familiar with their brand. Displaying ten items from their online store for a promotion called ‘lucky counter’, they held a sale with a difference where the more tweets an item received, the lower its eventual price was. The campaign was a success where some items ended up having 60% taken off their original price.

The clothing company held other campaigns such as a ‘virtual line’ campaign where every to celebrate its 26th birthday, every 26th person to join the campaign would receive a voucher worth around €10. 15,000 twitter users joined the first day before increasing to 60,000 by the second day, growing further until the four days were up. The campaign was held in China and Taiwan where the latter country’s virtual line ended up with 640,000 users by the end.

Mercedez Benz

Campaign: Tweet race

A race with a difference. After selecting four people from a selection of 2,000 entrants, they embarked from different locations in Mercedez Benz vehicles which were powered by tweets. Every four tweets would allow their car to travel one mile which was being tracked in real-time. Over 27,000 people participated while the campaign received over 500 million impressions on twitter.

KLM

Campaign: Surprise gift

The airline, KLM, decided to give some of their customers a surprise before their flight. By getting their staff to browse Twitter and Foursquare, they found people who mentioned they were flying with KLM. Then using info they provided on social media sites, the flight attendants purchased an appropriate gift and presented it to the passenger when they arrived at the airport.

Around 40 customers were given gifts which ranged from being upgraded to first class seating on both flights, guidebooks, watches and muscle ointment and bandages for one man who was travelling to Mexico to build houses for the homeless

Don’t tell Ashton (Kutcher)

Campaign: Exactly what it sounds like

The only campaign on this list that isn’t promoting a brand or product, this campaign is the idea of Swedish artist Jon Holm who decided to create live artwork made up solely of user’s profile pictures.

The size of each picture is proportionate to how many followers you have so the more you have the bigger your profile picture is. The hook of the campaign is a joke not to tell one of the most popular twitter users around, Aston Kutcher, as his follower count is so large it would take up the entire frame and block everyone else. They’ve already presented the finished product to Kutcher but the campaign still lives on.

Edge Shave Gel

Campign: Anti-irritation

Similar to KLM’s campaign, Edge ddi the same for its anti-irritation campaign except they gave gifts to people who were experiencing certain problems. From people using the #soirritating hashtag, Edge carried out random acts of kindness such as giving out iPads, computers, megaphones, cereal and a Spanish/English dictionary to a woman who tweeted that there were voices in her head speaking Spanish.

Orange

Campign: #WinterWarmer

Wanting to cheer up people in Britain, mobile phone company Orange decided to run a #Winterwarmer campaign in London, Birmingham, Manchester and Brighton where they delivered scarves and huge hot chocolates to people who friends tweeted their username with the hashtag. The Orange vans then tracked down the details of each person’s location and stopped by to hand them out their gifts.

True Blood HBO

Campaign: Season three promotion

To promote their third season of the successful vampire comedy drama, the show’s marketing team launched a digital media campaign centred on ‘The True Blood Ultimate Fan Experience’ with particular focus on Twitter. Holding midnight screenings in 50 different cities simutaneously, they used the site to share clues for which city would get tickets next. The screening included an early viewing of the season 2 finale, a sneak peak of season 3 and a live simulcast Q&A session with the creator, Alan Ball, and the cast.

The show’s blog, Bloodcopy.com, became a Twitter microsite which among other campaigns such as ‘Ultimate Truebie Sheriffs’ where fans tweeted why they should be the sheriff in their city to win tickets. To top it off, the show invited two of their actors to host a live Twitter chat at Bloodcopy.com on the night of the finale.

Bon Me Food Truck

Campaign: Improving the business

Twitter campaigns don’t have to be large scale as the examples above, sometimes to be unique, just being attentive and engaging can gives you the desired effect. Bon Me, a small Vietnamese food truck company in Boston, alerted followers through twitter about where it was going to be located, engaged with customers and posted updates to their menus.

By engaging with their customers, users wanted to know where they were serving next and even suggesting where they’d like for the truck to go next or what menu items they’d like to see. Simple but sweet.

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