Campaigns: Social Media Beyond the Selfie

Social media is notorious for selfies, videos of cute dogs (or as we know them, the goodest boys), and epic failures of our peers. However, we sometimes forget that there are people and companies who actually utilize social media for more serious purposes. In today's blog, we investigate campaigns on social media.

Campaigning on social media is free, easy, and very effective. With around 77% of Americans having some sort of social media, it is easy to see why companies took to these platforms to promote their ideas, events, and, most importantly, their products. There are many different tactics a company can use when taking to social media, but here are two real life examples that proved to be pretty effective.

Coca-Cola's social media campaign called "Share a Coke" is a prime example. By making bottles with user's names on them, the company connects to their consumers on a deeper, more personal level. They expanded on this success by making the hashtag #shareacoke. This allows consumers to share pictures and videos of them enjoying their Coca-Cola experience to the world. Since its creation, the hashtag has been used on millions of Twitter and Instagram posts.

Another good example is Starbucks, which used social media to get consumers excited for a new product. Their Unicorn Frappuccino, which was described by the company as being "Color-changing, flavor-changing, potentially life-changing," was only offered for a limited time. They created the hashtag #unicornfrappuccino to hype their customers up for the release of the drink. Once released, people took to media to share their reviews of the exciting new product. This, in turn, helped increase same-store sales for the second quarter by 3%.

The best part about both of these examples? The company did not have to do much work beyond starting the campaigns, as consumers did most of the leg work by promoting the product for them.

Now that we've observed the benefits of social media campaigns, it would be worthwhile to examine their potential downfalls. One area that is of particular concern for campaigns is their inclusiveness. Social media campaigns are already fairly exclusive in and of itself. People who are not on social media, which includes a large portion of the lower socioeconomic class since they cannot afford the technology to access it, are automatically excluded from these campaigns. In order to include these people, the social media campaign should run in conjunction with campaigns happening in real life in the forms of billboards, commercials, and other promotional activities.

Once on social media, the campaign can exclude even more groups of people. The campaign needs to be inclusive of people with different abilities, languages, genders, ages, and a variety of other factors. For this reason, a variety of accessibility features need to be available. One such feature may be having closed captioning for videos so people with impaired hearing can understand what is being presented. Another example would be making the text as readable as possible, so people of all reading and vision abilities can see and understand the text. A less obvious example would be including people of different ethnic backgrounds in photos so as to make all people feel welcomed by the campaign.

Let's run through an example campaign and analyze the people it includes and excludes. If our company was selling a new candy bar, for example, they might apply the same tactics that companies like Coca-Cola and Starbucks used. They would start by making posts of the candy bar and may even start a hashtag for it. Candy bars are made for everyone, regardless of qualities such as age and race, therefore these ads should be inclusive for everyone. One way they could accomplish this would be by posting photos of people with all different backgrounds enjoying the candy bar. Despite the efforts to make everyone feel included, less tech savvy people may not understand the hashtag or may not be able to navigate to the company's home page or website to learn more about the product. For these reasons, some people may be excluded.

So, although social media may be a powerful resource for companies to use to promote a product or run some other sort of campaign, caution must be taken to ensure everyone is included.

Works Cited/Consulted

https://blog.hootsuite.com/inclusive-design-social-media/

https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/social-media-campaigns

https://blog.hootsuite.com/social-media-campaign-strategy/