5 Inspiring Social Media Marketing Examples (+ Key Takeaways)
Do you need a few social media marketing examples to inspire your next big campaign?
A proper social media campaign has a defined goal and strategic content designed to help your brand reach that goal.
That’s why in this post, we’ve rounded up a handful of social media marketing examples that cover different campaign types.
Some of these examples are from big-name brands while others are from prolific bloggers.
Nevertheless, they’ll help you come up with a few ideas for your next campaign.
Let’s get into it.
The best social media marketing examples
Social media marketing examples featured on this list:
- User-generated content – Photos, videos and text-based posts created by your followers that feature your products or mention your brand.
- Advocacy – Influencers you sponsor in an elaborate social media campaign that increases brand awareness and dramatically improves sales.
- Product collaboration – A collaboration between your company and another (or an influencer) that produces a product featuring essences of both brands.
- Conversions – A campaign designed to increase conversions in the form of clicks, sign-ups, sales, etc.
- Brand awareness – A simple social media marketing campaign that increases brand awareness.
1. Apple: Encouraging user-generated content
- Influencer class: Brand (Tech)
- Campaign type: User-Generated Content
- Campaign: Encouraging users to post photos taken with an iPhone on Instagram and using the hashtag #shotoniphone.
- Total engagements from campaign: 27.4 million Posts
- Primary platform for campaign: Instagram
The Shot On iPhone campaign is one of the most successful (and longest running) social media marketing campaigns in existence.
The hashtag it’s associated with, #shotinphone, has generated over 27.4 million posts on Instagram alone since Apple launched the campaign in 2014.
The campaign is simple: social media users are asked to take photos with their iPhone and add them to social media posts using the hashtag #shotoniphone.
These types of posts are called “user-generated content” in the marketing industry. The term describes branded content that’s created by users but benefits the brands they’re associated with.
Apple has also used the Shot On iPhone campaign to run contests and launch bigger marketing campaigns, such as the marketing campaign they launched with Selena Gomez by shooting her music video for “Lose You to Love Me” on an iPhone.
Video ads released for the song featured the tagline “Shot On iPhone.”
Key takeaways
Apple is one of the most profitable tech companies around the world, so it only makes sense for a campaign of theirs to generate millions and millions of posts and become one of the best social media marketing examples out there.
Even so, you can replicate this social media marketing campaign and still see decent results from your own target audience.
Ask your followers to share some aspect of your business in one way or another.
For example, food blogger Pinch of Yum asks their readers to share images of the recipes they cook by using the hashtag #pinchofyum on Instagram.
If you really want to boost your engagements from this type of campaign, consider using a tool like SweepWidget.
It allows you to run social media contests that ensure contestants submit an Instagram photo as an entry, among other entry methods.
You can also schedule your own posts with Sendible, a social media scheduling tool that allows you to create a library of hashtag groups to quickly add hashtags to new posts.
You can use this feature to create a group filled with branded hashtags.
The biggest takeaways from this campaign are the ways in which it helps your brand.
For one, it ensures your brand has a continuous presence across multiple social media marketing platforms without you having to post anything. Your followers will do it for you!
Secondly, it gives you more content to work with. You can easily repost your followers’ posts to your own social media accounts.
Just be sure to tag them so they receive engagements as well.
2. Function of Beauty: Advocacy from YouTubers
- Influencer class: Brand (Beauty)
- Campaign type: Advocacy
- Campaign: Giving multiple YouTubers and influencers free products, affiliate links and special promo codes in exchange for appearing in their content.
- Total engagements from campaign: Unknown but in the hundreds of thousands of video views and post likes.
- Primary platform for campaign: YouTube
Function of Beauty is a beauty product with a twist.
When they first launched their line of shampoos and conditioners, they distinguished themselves from similar brands by offering personalized hair care formulas.
All you had to do was take a simple quiz that asked a few questions about your hair type, favorite color and scent preferences, and the brand would craft (and still does craft) personalized bottles of shampoo and conditioner suited to your hair type.
This is what attracted many influencers, namely YouTubers, to the brand when Function of Beauty approached them to collaborate in 2019 and beyond.
Soon, interest in the brand started to skyrocket.
Function of Beauty offered to collaborate and send free products to the influencers who would go on to push the brand’s name to the forefront of the industry.
Some influencers were given plain affiliate links while others received their own branded discount codes and affiliate links to offer their audiences.
Most influencers reviewed the brand’s products by using them in place of their usual hair care products.
Others used the products for special content types, such as trying out new hair care routines. Some would even show themselves taking the hair care quiz in their respective videos.
Key takeaways
Function of Beauty’s campaign was effective for two reasons.
While they offered the same product as their competitors, they offered it in a different way.
Instead of just telling their subscribers to “click this link” and “use my promo code at checkout,” YouTubers invited their audiences to take the brand’s hair care quiz alongside them to generate their own formulas.
This made the buying process incredibly interactive. The personalization aspect of the product was just the cherry on the top.
You can create quizzes of your own with a tool like Interact.
This tool has the same question-and-answer functionalities you’re used to seeing in quizzes, but it has a number of additional features that make it a powerful tool for marketers.
With email opt-in fields and integrations with email marketing tools, including segmentation options, you can use this tool at the capture stage of a larger lead generation campaign.
You can even require leads to subscribe in order to see their results.
The second reason this campaign is one of the best social media marketing examples is because Function of Beauty didn’t rely on their own following to get the word out about their brand.
They utilized the audiences of numerous YouTubers instead, YouTubers who introduced the brand’s name to hundreds of thousands of viewers.
The next time you want to launch a social media campaign for your product, choose a specific social media platform to target, find an influencer(s) on that platform who’s in your niche and has a sizeable following (it just needs to be larger than yours), and consider leveraging the power of that following instead of relying on yours alone.
3. Lauren Conrad: Product collaboration
- Influencer class: Lifestyle Instagram Blogger
- Campaign type: Product Collaboration
- Campaign: Lauren’s company The Little Market collaborated with Saje Natural Wellness to offer a limited-edition aromatherapy diffuser.
- Total engagements from campaign: 949,000+ Video Views
- Primary platform for campaign: Instagram (934,571 video views came from Lauren’s account alone)
Lauren Conrad is a lifestyle blogger on Instagram who got her start in the influencer industry when she appeared on the 2000’s MTV reality shows Laguna Beach and The Hills.
Today, Lauren owns a homeware shop called The Little Market, which sells artisan-made home goods and gifts.
In mid 2021, The Little Market teamed up with Saje Natural Wellness to produce a limited-edition aromatherapy diffuser designed by Lauren and her co-founder Hannah Skvarla.
The campaign for the product launched as a promotional video posted to all four parties’ Instagram accounts on June 4, 2021.
It had varying results, which were dependent on each party’s follower account.
Lauren had millions of followers at the time, so her post received over 900,000 views and 13,000 likes while everyone else’s received a few thousand views and a few hundred likes each.
Key takeaways
This is one of the best social media marketing examples because it demonstrates a couple crucial realities many marketers forget about when it comes to social media marketing.
The first is the way in which social media users would rather interact with individuals on social media than brands.
This is why it’s easy for Lauren and many other lifestyle Instagram bloggers to grow their followings and receive thousands upon thousands of likes per post while her company’s Instagram account struggles to receive engagements.
The second reality is one many bloggers and influencers face when they start their own businesses and launch dedicated social media accounts alongside them.
That reality is that, once again, social media users would rather follow individual accounts, not brands.
What ends up happening is that, like Lauren’s Instagram account, the blogger’s own social media accounts wound up being a hub for their regular content as well as their business’ content.
They simply don’t receive enough engagements if they restrict their business’ content to their business’ social media accounts.
Finally, this social media campaign worked due to the simple act of collaboration.
By finding a like-minded company who produced products that complemented her niche, Lauren was able to offer a new kind of product she’d never offered to her audience before.
With all that said, if you try to replicate this campaign yourself, start by finding a like-minded brand or fellow influencer to collaborate with.
If they have a much larger following than you, put together a media kit before you reach out to them.
When you launch your campaign, publish it to social media accounts of everyone involved no matter how little their following is to increase the campaign’s reach.
4. Berrics: Reposting
- Influencer class: Brand (Skateboarding)
- Campaign type: Conversions (Clicks)
- Campaign: Reposting a viral skateboarding news story on various social media platforms.
- Total engagements from campaign: 135,224 Likes
- Primary platform for campaign: Instagram (130,939 likes, a 1,115.32% increase from usual like average)
Berrics is a prolific name in the skateboarding industry.
The company was founded by professional skateboarders Steve Berra and Eric Koston when the two opened a private skatepark (The Berrics) in Los Angeles, California.
Along with hosting skateboarding competitions at the park, the company started earning a following online early on in its history by publishing weekly videos on their website.
That influence has continued on social media.
Berrics organizes their social media content in a few different categories they’ve created themselves and post to regularly.
A few of those categories are dedicated to reposting skateboarding clips and news topics from around the web.
In this particular Instagram post, Berrics reshared a viral news story in the skateboarding world about award-winning rapper and fellow skateboarder Lil Wayne paying no mind to a Grammy’s afterparty in favor of watching skateboarding clips on his phone.
While the majority of Berrics’ reposts receive more likes than Berrics’ original content, this particular post was a clear marketing opportunity for the brand as the park is a frequent stop for Lil Wayne whenever he’s in LA.
By resharing the news story across their social media channels, Berrics was also able to subtly mention Lil Wayne’s frequent appearances at the park.
They linked to a news article published to their own website on Twitter and Facebook but used a carousel post on Instagram.
The carousel post allowed them to include a few videos of Lil Wayne at The Berrics skatepark.
They ended the caption with “Hit the link in bio to see more of @liltunechi skating at TheBerrics.com #skateboardingisfun #berrics”.
Key takeaways
Berrics reposted this news article to Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
It earned 185 likes on Twitter, 4,100 likes on Facebook and 130,939 likes on Instagram.
This was a huge boost in engagements across the board, and a 1,115.32% increase in likes on Instagram where Berrics earns an average of 10,774 likes per post.
Clearly, reposting trending news stories to your Instagram feed is an effective social media strategy, but why was this particular social media campaign one of the best social media marketing examples?
Like we said, it gave Berrics an opportunity to tie their brand into a trending news story.
More importantly, it enabled them to use one of the most popular social media campaigns: conversions in the form of clicks.
Those clicks were designated to the TheBerrics.com link in Berrics’ Instagram bio, but if you decide to use this strategy on your own Instagram account, consider using a link in bio tool like Shorby instead.
It’ll enable you to run multiple click campaigns at one time by giving you a simplified landing page to share links from.
It also gave Berrics an opportunity to tag Lil Wayne.
While he didn’t acknowledge the post directly, he did shout out Berrics a couple days later when an employee at the skateboard, Anthony Medina, died in a car accident.
Bottom line, when you use this type of campaign, try to tie your brand into it, and try to find a prolific influencer to tag, even if they only have a few more followers than you.
5. Nomadic Matt: Repurposing content
- Influencer class: Travel Blogger
- Campaign type: Brand Awareness
- Campaign: Repurposing blog content as a Twitter thread, and then as an Instagram carousel post.
- Total engagements from campaign: 6,147 Likes
- Primary platform for campaign: Instagram (5,901 likes, a 992.78% increase from usual like average)
This is a technique Nomadic Matt uses to boost engagements on Instagram.
While most of his posts receive anywhere from 75-1,000 likes, these posts receive a few thousand each.
What he does is repurpose old blog posts as Twitter threads.
In case you’re not social media-savvy, a Twitter thread is a series of tweets that all connect to one another, most of which are replies from other Twitter uses.
When you post your own thread, your subsequent tweets are posted as replies to your original tweet and appear above everyone else’s replies.
Matt posted this particular thread on May 24, 2022.
He used a blog post from his prolific travel blog Nomadic Matt. The post is titled “Travel Mistakes: 16 Things Not to Do When On the Road.”
While his original tweet introduced the topic of the thread, his next nine tweets featured one mistake from that original blog post each before ending with a closing tweet.
He repurposed the blog’s content again by posting the Twitter thread to Instagram on February 2, 2023.
This is a technique many Instagram influencers use. They create a carousel post where a screenshot of each tweet in the thread represents one image in the carousel.
Matt’s original thread received 246 likes collectively.
When he repurposed the thread as an Instagram post, he received 5,901 likes, a 992.78% increase from Matt’s usual like average of around 540 likes per post and a 2,298.78% increase in likes from the original Twitter thread.
Key takeaways
The reason this is one of the best social media marketing examples is because it uses a popular social media strategy for bloggers successfully: repurposing blog content into other content types.
It was a Twitter thread and Instagram post in this instance, but you can also repurpose blog content into ebooks, resource checklists, online courses and more.
Some bloggers prefer to repurpose posts that already perform well while others use under-performing posts to see if they’d do better elsewhere.
Matt’s original blog post has a page authority score of 49, which isn’t bad, but it’s definitely not one of the site’s major sources of traffic.
It served a renewed purpose as a way for Matt to increase brand awareness on Instagram, and you can do the same with your own blog posts.
Just be sure to use a tool like Missinglettr to make things easier on yourself. It turns blog content into social media content automatically.
Final thoughts
We hoped these social media marketing examples gave you a few new ideas for your next campaign.
Let’s recap each one briefly.
User-generated content is one of the most effective social media campaigns you can use, especially if you have an active audience.
Even if you don’t have an active audience, you can encourage your audience to engage with your brand on social media by hosting a contest or giveaway (with SweepWidget) that requires your followers to submit user-generated content.
Advocacy is a great strategy to use if you have an under-performing product you want to push in front of new eyes.
It’s especially a useful strategy to use if your own following is too small to generate sales.
This is also true for product collaborations. If you want to generate buzz for your business on social media, collaborate on a new product with a brand or influencer to help raise awareness for both of you across numerous social media channels.
Speaking of, brand awareness and conversion-based campaigns are some of the simplest campaigns you can run on social media but can also be the most effective.
You can do something as simple as the strategies Berrics and Nomadic Matt use: reposting clips and news stories from around your niche to your own social media accounts, and repurposing blog content as social media content.
No matter what strategy you decide to use, take your time with the planning phase so you can go as big and bold as possible.
Also, consider using a proper social media scheduling tool like Sendible.
It has powerful social media analytics features that’ll help you analyze each campaign you run so you can optimize them in the future.
In the meantime, you can focus on growing your following to enhance the performance of your next campaign.
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