Over the weekend, you may have seen a few more colours on Facebook than just the usual dark blue. To coincide with London Pride (and the legalisation of gay marriage across America) the social media giant launched the ‘celebrate pride’ tool which lets users add a rainbow over their profile pictures. If you’d like to see what your picture looks like with an added rainbow, you can do so by going to www.facebook.com/celebratepride
As a social media campaign by Facebook this has been highly successful with users opting to carry their profile pictures across to other networks such as Twitter a big (and clever) victory for Facebook. The social networks have all been releasing new features to coincide with big events, the most recent being the hashflags on Twitter for the General Election and Football World Cup
There are a few lessons we can learn from the latest high profile social media marketing campaign and apply to campaigns that we run or are currently planning.
Be visual
Rainbow profile pictures are really eye catching so the campaign gained visual appeal immediately
Be recognisable
Using the rainbow flag which is widely covered in the media and popular culture as being the flag in support of LGBTQ equality. Using a recognisable symbol or phrase can increase visibility of your campaign
Be viral (in a good way)
Make sure your message or graphic is easily shareable amongst influencers on social media to ensure your post gets out there are quickly and to as large an audience as possible
Be visible
Coincide your message with a relevant event (and make sure you use the right hashtag!). If you know that a nation or worldwide event is taking place which is relevant to your campaign, spread it to the community who are attending the event, they are likely to be talking about it on social media.
Be ‘en pointe’ not controversial
By harnessing the emotional view of a lot of people you can reach much further with your campaign and make it more shareable but it’s a fine line between harnessing this and being controversial. Make sure your hitting the nail on the head with campaigns and be factual not opinion based. This is unless of course you’re being deliberately outspoken though this isn’t something we’d recommend a brand to do as it can lose you following.
In this campaign there has been plenty of resistance around the world summed up well by this BBC article but in the UK it has been largely accepted and any disapproval has been quashed by the rest of the online community.
If you’d like help running a social media campaign, give us a call in the office 0845 094 6108 or drop us an email at info@cosmic.org.uk. Of course, you can always tweet us or post to our Facebook wall too.