Social Media Marketing - The 5 Best Social Media Marketing Strategies Ever

By Author: nicksmith
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Many companies join the social media world in the hopes it will grow their business. Social media for marketing is appealing because it appears to be a cheap and easy way to market your business throughout the web. Unfortunately, many of these companies overlook the need to devise a serious, in depth marketing plan for their social media campaign. I always suggest that you hire a social media marketing consultant at least in the beginning of your social media journey to get on the right track. The bottom line is you can waste hours trying to use social media for marketing and see no results. However, with the right strategy and expertise (or social media marketing consultant), social media marketing can pre tremendously successful. Below are the what I believe to be the best social media marketing campaigns ever.

5) Gap / Groupon - This may not be considered one of the best social media campaigns ever by most, but I believe that Gap had the right idea and they succeeded. Gap offered a $50 gift card for $25 as a nationwide offering on Groupon. That ...
... alone brought in $11 million revenue and is probably one of the most successful Groupon campaigns ever. Their goal was to bring in new customers and they believe that they've succeeded initially. They will only really know their level of success by card redemption's and surveying those who use them to see about repeat business.

4) Hotmail - You can't deny that Hotmail did no advertising but still managed to sign almost everyone up for a Hotmail account simply by adding "Get Your Free Email at Hotmail" to the bottom of every outgoing email from a Hotmail user. If that's not viral, then I'm not sure what it is. Unfortunately for Hotmail, their competition is simply too much right now. They should also have better security as it seems more Hotmail users acquire viruses than do other email account types.

3) Old Spice 'Smell Like a Man's Man' - Mustafa is about as famous as Paris Hilton. Sure, he's on TV as a commercial character, but he's even more popular on the web. In one summer, Isaiah Mustafa was asked question after question on Facebook and Twitter. They filmed 186 YouTube videos last summer and the views and hits were out of this world (5.9 million on Day 1 alone...190 million in total and counting). Mustafa is an instant celebrity and has even proposed marriage to a female fan over the Internet. Oh, sales also soared 107% that summer.

2) OfficeMax / 'Elf Yourself' - This social media campaign still exists today (I believe) but was started in 2006 where OfficeMax allowed people to upload photos of themselves into 'elf bodies' to sing and dance online. They increased sales and brand awareness from this campaign and the 122 million elves that were created in just that year alone.

1) Blair Witch Project - I have to agree with FORBES Magazine here. Does anyone vividly remember the hype around this movie? People believed that this movie was real. I was only a small teenager when this came out, so I cannot actually understand how people believed the movie to be real, but they did. They posted on message boards, create fake newspaper clippings and more. The viral message about this movie was light years beyond other viral campaigns today. Bravo to the people who created this movie (and on a shoestring budget at that).

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