Social media campaigns are self-contained, limited-time bursts of themed social content. That means they provide unique opportunities to experiment with new ways to build brand reputation, awareness, or sales.
Key takeaways
Social media campaigns are targeted, time-bound sets of social content designed to achieve specific business goals, like raising brand awareness, driving engagement, or boosting sales.
Unlike ongoing social media activity, social media campaigns focus on a particular theme or objective and often include unique KPIs.
Social media campaigns provide a unique opportunity to A/B test different elements—like tone, visuals, or formats—within a focused timeframe. Testing only one component at a time allows you to pinpoint what works best, helping refine both the campaign’s impact and your overall social strategy.
What is a social media campaign?
A social media campaign is a coordinated set of social media marketing efforts (both paid and organic) over a set period of time to achieve a specific goal.
Typically, a social media campaign has a specific theme or is tied to a specific season, promotion, or product launch.
A social media campaign can span multiple social platforms (although it doesn’t have to). It may include:
and user-generated content (rather than only content created by the brand).
It might also include a campaign-specific hashtag.
A social media campaign is more concentrated, specific, and targeted than your “business as usual” social media content. It has its own KPIs and usually runs for a specific period of time (such as a certain number of weeks leading up to a launch).
That said, all social media campaigns should reinforce, align with, and complement your overall social media marketing strategy.
How to plan an effective social media campaign
Name the focus
Remember, a social media marketing campaign is not just a collection of content. It’s a targeted social media effort with its own goals and timeline. Getting really clear on the focus of your campaign is a critical first step.
What is the driving force behind your campaign? Is it a seasonal promotion, or are you promoting a specific new product/service/etc.?
Social listening is a useful strategy here for coming up with social media campaign ideas. What is your audience talking about? Hootsuite Listening can help you identify clusters of conversation that might inspire your next social media marketing campaign.
Talk to other teams within your company, too. Teams with specific product or customer expertise might have valuable insights that spark a unique campaign or content idea.
Of course, choosing your campaign focus is about much more than selecting a fun theme. The most important question is what is the business value of the campaign? What business goals do you want to achieve?
Campaign objectives could include:
Growing your follower count
Increasing engagement
Driving web or store traffic
Increasing brand awareness
Capturing more social share of voice
Increasing sales or other conversion events (like email signups, contest entries, or whitepaper downloads)
Once you know your overall objective, you can choose relevant metrics. Then set specific targets to evaluate your campaign success.
Pick the right channels and content formats
You’ll need to do your research here. Start with your audience. Which social networks do they hang out on? How do they prefer to interact with brands? What kind of content resonates?
Audience analysis tools like Hootsuite Analytics and Hootsuite Listening can help you answer these critical questions.
Then look at the competition, using those same research tools. You don’t want to copy competitors’ work, but you can certainly be inspired by their past social media campaign ideas. And the competitive analytics tools within Hootsuite show you exactly which social media platforms and types of content are working best for your competitors.
Hootsuite Analytics
Give your content calendar the best chance for success by posting at the right time on each platform. Use audience research tools to see when your target audience is most active on each platform. Or, rely on the best time to post recommendations built into Hootsuite. Set up your schedule of campaign posts in advance to ensure you get the right cadence, rather than posting on the fly each day.
Lean into psychology
This is another area where social listening is particularly useful, as it can help you understand the nuances of language your audience uses online.
Social sentiment monitoring is also useful here. It gives you more insight into how your audience really feels about your brand, your products, and your competitors. Using a sentiment-monitoring tool like Hootsuite Listening, you can start to understand the motivations that drive your audience to engage on social media. Incorporate persuasive language in your campaign that speaks directly to those motivations.
The limited timeframe of social media campaigns can also be used to create a scarcity motivation, a.k.a. FOMO (fear of missing out).
Social campaigns provide an excellent opportunity to harness social proof. Especially those designed to reach an audience that is not already familiar with your brand. Gather customer testimonials or feedback. And encourage engagement with loyal fans to highlight the value of your products and your brand.
Work with influencers and UGC creators
Speaking of social proof – getting people outside of your company involved in your social campaign is a valuable way to build your brand reputation and extend your reach.
Look for influencers that have an established niche that dovetails with your campaign goals and theme. This may create the opportunity to work with creators who would not necessarily be a fit for your more general social strategy. In particular, you may be able to find micro- or nano-influencers with a dedicated following that aligns with the focus of a particular campaign.
A/B test every element of your campaign
A campaign is effectively its own universe. That gives you free rein to test and tweak every element of your campaign to maximize results.
For example, the self-contained nature of a campaign allows you to get a little bolder with testing elements like voice and emotional tone. You can color a little outside the lines of your usual brand guidelines here. But keep a close eye on your engagement, mentions, and social sentiment in real time. You need to make sure your choices don’t have a negative effect on the overall brand.
The key to effective A/B testing is to test only one component at a time. Otherwise, you have no way of knowing which element affected your campaign performance. You have to get really granular here.
When you’re evaluating the success of a change, be sure to connect the results back to your stated goals. A change that gets more likes is great. And there may be lessons there that you can incorporate back into your overall social strategy. But if the goal of your campaign is to drive website traffic, then site visits is the target metric on which you need to focus for campaign purposes
Free social media campaign template
Bonus: Download a free social media campaign template to help you plan your next goal-crushing campaign of any size or budget. Assign responsibilities, set timelines, list deliverables, and more!
5 successful social media campaigns from 2024
Here are five impressive social media campaign examples to inspire you.
1. Tinder: It Starts With a Swipe + Long Story Shorts
In 2024, this push focused on real stories. This started with the latest installment of Tinder’s “It Starts with a Swipe” campaign, launched in July. This series of four videos was based on the first Tinder messages of real couples that met on the platform.
It Starts with a Swipe ran on TV and was even featured on billboards, but the campaign got significant support from Tinder’s social media channels. One of the videos brought in more than 150,000 likes on Instagram and more than 55 million views on TikTok.
Additional social video content created during the shoot brought in even more engagement. This TikTok featuring Lana Condor got nearly 40,000 views.
Oh yes – the ads featured well-known actors popular with Gen Z, the target demographic, like Lana Condor and Evan Mock. Those well-known personalities with their own social followings helped extend the campaign’s reach.
In August, Tinder leaned harder into the social proof concept. They launched a new social-first campaign entitled Long Story Shorts. Again, these featured stories from real couples that met on Tinder. The company created six installments for Instagram and 18 for TikTok.
The couples tell their own love stories in the videos, but Tinder again brings in reach-extending influencers, who help to reenact the scenarios the couples describe.
Some of the videos topped 1.5 million views on TikTok.
Why it worked
These campaigns were all about using social proof to shift brand perception. They were entirely based on real stories of couples who found love on the app. Creating “meet-cute” videos based on these real relationships showcased the app’s potential to offer more than casual connections.
Adding in known personalities – actors and digital creators – expanded the reach of the campaigns.
What you can learn
Social proof is a powerful thing. Look for unique ways to highlight customer success stories and testimonials.
Storytelling draws attention. Rather than having these couples talk about how great Tinder is, they talked about the beginnings of their relationships. The story is more compelling than a straight-up endorsement.
Known names draw attention. Whether it’s TV actors or digital creators, look for personalities that help make a connection with the demographic you want to target.
2. KamalaHQ: Digital Rapid Response
Source: @KamalaHQ
The social team behind Kamala Harris’s @KamalaHQ campaign social accounts has been called a “team of feral 25-year-olds.” That’s no insult. Deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty described them this way to Politico when talking up their impressive work that is like nothing seen before from a presidential campaign.
The @KamalaHQ pages on Instagram, TikTok, and other social channels are official campaign accounts. But they take a very different tone from the candidate’s more traditional social media posts on her @KamalaHarris accounts.
The @KamalaHQ team is focused on “digital rapid response.” They watch what’s happening from both sides on the campaign trail and can conceive, create, and post a social video within half an hour. They might post more than a dozen videos in one day. The engaging content is targeted at young voters and may be baffling to anyone over the age of 30.
The numbers speak for themselves. The team’s social videos regularly rack up hundreds of thousands to millions of views. The TikTok posted above got 3.4 million.
Why it worked
This is a campaign by young people for young people. The more established communications professionals on the Harris team – and Harris herself – likely can’t quite wrap their heads around exactly what’s happening on the @KamalaHQ accounts.
But that’s precisely the point. They recognized that social video is a new language, and they were willing to put native speakers of that language in charge.
What you can learn
TikTok is a universe unto itself. The lessons learned from campaigns on other social platforms don’t necessarily transfer. If you don’t have TikTok pros on your team, connect with influencers who fully understand the platform to make the most of its unique character.
Be willing to take risks. This is not standard operating procedure for a political campaign, but it’s a necessary risk to connect with the target audience of young voters.
Empower your team. Approval workflows are important, and they can sometimes save your bacon. But when things are moving fast, it’s useful for select team members to have the trust and authority to act quickly on their own.
3. Dunkin’: Spidey D
Source: @Dunkin
It got weirder from there, as Spidey D made double entendres with a cheeky tone that had commenters suggesting the marketing team would get a call from HR. In his last post on October 30, he threatened to leak the Dunkin’ holiday menu.
Posts in this campaign saw 20K to 137K likes on Instagram, and 100K to 1.6 million views on TikTok. As Spidey D gained popularity, other brands hopped into the comments, from Ocean Spray to Scrub Daddy.
Source: @Dunkin
But what’s really interesting here is that an X post from an account with only 18.7K followers highlighting the unhinged nature of the campaign got 8.3 million views, 23K reshares, and 16K saves.
Plus, the traditional media picked up on the bonkers campaign, which brought Dunkin’ a huge amount of news coverage, too.
Source: Google News
Why it worked
The “unhinged social media manager” caricature has mainly fallen out of favor. But an unhinged social media character that’s only around for 10 days? Clearly the Internet was very ready for that.
This was a risky (and risqué) campaign. But it drew huge attention to the brand. Did it sell donuts? Some commenters noted the spider donuts were sold out when they tried to get them. And by linking Spidey D to the launch of the holiday menu, the brand may have gained attention for two different seasonal promotions using one campaign.
What you can learn
The main takeaway here is that high-risk moves in social media campaigns can translate to high rewards.
While not every brand can get away with such a spicy campaign, it’s worth looking at ways you can experiment with something a little beyond your normal comfort zone.
4. Applebees: Pre-Seasoning
As football season started, Applebee’s took the opportunity to highlight its new status as the “Official Grill + Bar Sponsor” of the NFL. To celebrate the connection, the brand created a six-part series of social videos.
Called Pre-Seasoning, the social media ad campaign videos feature Detroit Lions Head Coach Dan Campbell, Philadelphia Eagles running back Saquon Barkley, and San Francisco 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy. They mimic a football training camp documentary, but instead show the players and coach training to work at Applebees.
The videos saw between 62K and 111K views each on Facebook and up to 1.8 million views on TikTok.
According to the agency behind the campaign, the videos led to a 39% increase in mentions of Applebee’s on social media, along with an 84% increase in impressions, and 15.1% increase in positive brand sentiment.
Why it worked
Applebee’s created shorter versions of these videos to run on TV, but social video allows them to get more in-depth with video lengths of two minutes or more. This gave the brand the chance to get more creative and really lean into the docu-style nature of the social media advertising campaign.
What you can learn
Think creatively about how to use social video, and take advantage of longer formats when appropriate.
Look for ways to repurpose or modify content for different platforms and audiences.
5. Hootsuite: Hootsuite Listening launch (LinkedIn influencer campaign)
LinkedIn is not a common platform for influencer marketing campaigns, making it a potentially untapped marketplace for this type of social ad.
When Hootsuite launched its new Listening product powered by Talkwalker, it made sense to focus on an audience of social media professionals. Hootsuite partnered with a core group of relevant LinkedIn thought leaders in the social media space to get the word out.
The posts were text-heavy, and all featured similar images of the thought leaders with their laptops. They highlighted specific data found using Hootsuite Listening, and how that data impacted their campaign strategy.
The posts got up to 500 likes. While that might not seem like a huge number, consider the degree of connection between the people who posted the content and those who liked their posts. This was powerful social proof being presented directly to people who could really use this product.
Just for fun, the company created a similar post from Owly, Hootsuite’s mascot:
This is not Hootsuite’s first LinkedIn influencer campaign. Hootsuite took a similar approach when launching its Social Media Careers Report last summer. That campaign saw more than 1.2 million impressions, 5,600 link clicks, and more than 18,800 engagements.
Why it worked
LinkedIn is a uniquely useful platform for B2B brands. While creator partnerships are rare, they allow B2B brands to connect with exactly the right audiences for their products and services.
The text-heavy format of the posts was important here. It allowed enough space to really highlight the value of the product in detail, rather than just having the creators say they liked it.
What you can learn
Instagram and TikTok may be top of mind for influencer partnerships, but don’t neglect other platforms that offer the chance to connect with specific audience segments.
Your content creation efforts (or briefs for partners that specify content) should be stylistically appropriate for the platform. These posts are perfect for LinkedIn but would feel entirely out of place on other channels.
Use Hootsuite to manage your next social media campaign. From a single dashboard, you can schedule and publish posts across networks, engage the audience, and measure results. Try it free today.
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Find out how to create high-ROI social media campaigns with examples from top brands. From planning to a free template, we cover everything you need to boost engagement and drive results.
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