Running a social media campaign that stands out takes hefty doses of creativity, patience, research, and the ability to know a good idea when you see one. 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 2023 to get inspired.
Ask yourself: 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 media 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 2023
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. There are even artificial intelligence tools, like HubSpot's AI campaign assistant, that will generate all of this for you.
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 2023
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 2023 and what you can learn from them:
1. Burger King’s “You Rule” Campaign
2. Dove’s Detox Your Feed Campaign
3. Cadbury Worldwide Hide Event
4. Casper’s 10 Days of Costumes
5. Amazon’s Marvelous Mile
6. Nike’s No Pride, No Sport Campaign
7. Pepsi’s New Visual Identity
8. McDonald’s Raise Your Arches Campaign
9. Duolingo’s Adoption Center
10. Uber Eats’s Iftar Incoming
1. Burger King’s “You Rule” Campaign
Burger King’s catchy “Whopper, Whopper” jingles have dominated most of 2023, even giving Burger King the number one share of voice for restaurants in NFL-related conversations. Its overarching theme on social media this year has been “You Rule,” putting the focus on the customers who made the jingle go viral in the first place.
Throughout the year, Burger King’s social media creatives have run with this theme in the brand’s content, with captions like “It’s Crowning Szn” for a homecoming post and a collection of user-generated content with the caption “y’all out here ruling spooky season.”
These are great examples of how brands can tie in a key theme or message across different posts to maintain brand unity.
2. Dove’s Detox Your Feed Campaign
Dove has long been a brand synonymous with social responsibility. From their groundbreaking Campaign for Real Beauty to their commitment to promoting positive body image, Dove has consistently pushed the boundaries of what it means to be a responsible brand.
Its recent campaign, #DetoxYourFeed, continues this tradition, this time focusing on helping parents set the tone for their children on social media.
In this campaign, Dove invited mother-daughter pairs to view social content and its resulting impact. One clip showed a mother speaking out in favor of questionable practices like Botox for babies.
The brand also used deep-fake technology to show how powerfully convincing social media can be. The campaign encouraged parents and their children to unfollow toxic influencers, build healthy social media habits, and recognize bad beauty advice.
Are you interested in more Dove campaigns? Learn how Dove raises the bar with its #ArmsUp campaign.
3. Cadbury Worldwide Hide Event
Beloved chocolate brand Cadbury always brings out the creativity at Easter time, and 2023 was no different. This time, the brand partnered with Google Maps to create one of the largest egg hunts of all time. Egg hunters could hide digital eggs around the world and mark their locations on Google Maps.
4. Casper’s 10 Days of Costumes
Mattress brand Casper took a fun approach to showcase its products by dressing up its iconic mattress-in-a-box in unique Halloween costumes.
This campaign brings awareness to Casper’s packaging, which is a big part of its visual brand identity. It also invites some fun onto its social media pages without the sales pitch.
5. Amazon’s Marvelous Mile
The top social media campaigns of 2023 don’t always start on social media — rather, it’s a destination. This is the case for Amazon’s hit show, “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” as the streaming platform paid homage to its final season.
The pop-up event in New York featured a flashy pink car and a mile-long pink carpet stretching for 10 blocks along Fifth Avenue. Along the way, visitors could engage with interactive stops and photo ops, all filled with themes of the ‘50s and ‘60s.
The event also spawned the Pink Shoe Laces Challenge, or #PSLChallenge (no pumpkin spice lattes here) which earned over 50 million views on Instagram and TikTok.
See also: Principles of Successful Social Media Challenges
6. Nike’s No Pride, No Sport Campaign
June is the official Pride Month each year, but socially forward brands like Nike know that pride isn’t something that lasts only for a season. That’s why it introduced the Pride for Life campaign, focusing on LGBT athletes.
The campaign launched with two 60-second films, with the goal of showcasing real stories from the LGBT market segment, including athletes and pride-friendly fitness centers. The campaign provides an excellent follow-up to the previously launched “Be True” collection.
7. Pepsi’s New Visual Identity
Y2K nostalgia is in full force, and Pepsi took to social media to showcase its reinvented visual identity. Post pandemic, the brand is taking the opportunity to refresh its image, harkening back to its roots in the music industry and trading flat icons for bolder, more dynamic visuals. And it’s giving its fans a heads-up on social media.
The video announcement has since racked up more than 203K views on YouTube, with the full brand rollout coming in fall 2023 and more upgraded brand content on the way.
8. McDonald’s Raise Your Arches Campaign
McDonald’s is well recognized for its pair of golden arches, and the brand leveraged this claim to fame in its Raise Your Arches campaign. The campaign was designed to mirror the excitement its customers feel when thinking about grabbing a Big Mac for lunch or treating themselves to a McFlurry.
A quick raise of the eyebrows when McDonald’s comes to mind is a simple yet powerful gesture. The campaign earned over 1,000 Instagram posts and more than 5 million views on TikTok of customers “raising their arches” as a show of solidarity in their affinity for McDonald’s.
9. Duolingo’s Adoption Center
Netflix nearly broke the internet when it announced it was ending password sharing. So language company Duolingo decided to take their own narrative in another direction with its Adoption Center campaign. For family subscriptions with unused slots, the brand notified customers that they could “adopt” users outside the family to fill those seats.
Not only did the campaign resonate with customers at a time when many were thinking other brands would follow in Netflix’s footsteps, it also raised awareness about its family subscriptions.
10. Uber Eats’s Iftar Incoming
Uber Eats used social media to show its commitment to diversity and inclusion by tying its campaign to the Muslim holiday Ramadan. During this period of fasting, Muslims break their fast at sunset — a meal referred to as Iftar.
To cater to their Muslim customers during this time, Uber Eats developed a series of posts, each one featuring an image of a tasty dish along with the time of the sunset for each day.
Using Meltwater for Your Social Media Campaigns
No matter your campaign, posting the content isn’t the end goal. Once your campaign goes live, use brand tracking software to monitor and measure its impact so you can see how you’re making a difference.
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.
