Social Media Campaigns That Rise Above
In the fast-paced and highly saturated world of social media, it can be difficult to establish online presence and awareness. Ideal content will attract not only attention but rewarding engagement and interaction. Establishing an online presence is only the first step for companies. Next they must master the skill of standing out from their competitors, and avoid being drowned out by the high traffic nature of social media. This begs the question: how does one create a unique voice on social media? In the world of constant content, how do you create the one campaign that catches attention? The following are just a few examples of some unique and innovative ideas in recent social media campaigns.
#KnowYourLemons
In February, Worldwide Breast Cancer launched a highly successful campaign that summarizes the importance of self check-ups, recognizing warning signs, and other important information about breast cancer as translated through lemons. The campaign is ingenious for a few reasons: it is simple, easy to understand, and it manages to summarize a large amount of crucial information into a basic and easily digestible format. It created a catchy campaign name and concept, managed to double not only as awareness but also as incentive to donate to Worldwide Breast Cancer, and started a conversation and community around the subject. The campaign perfectly strikes the balance between serious and lighthearted. Through just three Facebook posts, the campaign reached 7.3 million people.
#EndTheStigma
This viral sensation was started not by an organization, but by just one person: twenty-eight year old Kat Selwyn Layton. After the passing of mental health advocate Carrie Fisher, Layton was inspired to speak out more publicly in her own life about mental illness and wanted to encourage others to do the same. She created highly shareable online badges that featured all variations of mental illnesses and conditions. The badge featured the campaign name #EndTheStigma, with other hashtags of support such as #1in5, bringing awareness to the statistic that one in five American adults are living with a mental illness. This initiative is brilliant, as it takes an extremely direct approach. The simple campaign works towards dealing with shame, breaking silence around misunderstood or marginalized illnesses and creating a highly accessible and positive online mental health movement. The badges have been shared over 40 000 times on Facebook alone.
#LongestDay
Dublin Simon, a homeless charity in Dublin Ireland runs an awareness campaign on the day of the summer solstice, also known as the longest day of the year. The campaign centered around awareness for the homeless and a call to action to donate, simply through the message of "Everyday feels like the longest day of the year for those who are homeless". This campaign is extremely clever due to its ability to link a day you may otherwise think little of to its mission, and providing incentive to donate and get people thinking about its simple, but highly effective and shareable message.
#EndangeredEmoji
Seventeen of the animal emojis found on smartphone keyboards were highlighted as endangered by World Wildlife Fund, and the organization took to Twitter as an opportunity to raise awareness and generate donations. For every retweet or tweet of one of these endangered species, €0.10 was donated to WWF for awareness and conservation efforts. Strategically launched on World Endangered Species Day, this campaign is brilliant in that it could be re-run, with an updated list of endangered species that need help the following year. It is appealing to all ages, easy to get involved in, and makes great use of the easily understood and communicated tool and trend of emojis. As well, it gives an opportunity to give a visual for the endangered animal in an endearing way. The campaign generated over a million uses of the hashtag #Endangered Emoji, and thousands of followers gained to the WWF Twitter account.
These campaigns show how they were able to reach a larger audience and find success by taking unique approaches to their messages of awareness. Creating highly shareable content that can either appeal or at least interest a wide variety of people is a huge victory. When content online becomes viral, it becomes powerful.
References
https://econsultancy.com/blog/68758-the-best-social-media-campaigns-and-stories-from-january-2017
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/social-media-marketing-campaign-examples/192583/
https://twitter.com/Dublin_Simon?lang=en
http://mashable.com/2017/01/06/mental-illness-badges-endthestigma/#ozbovfUIHiqx