Here’s an open secret: virality isn’t guaranteed. It may not happen, even if you’ve created something creative, original, or unexpected. But what do some of the most popular viral campaigns have in common?
They effectively capture your audience’s attention and give them something to talk about. Effective viral campaigns also play into people’s emotions. They’re thought-provoking and fun and encourage people to spread the word online.
In this article, we’ll look into six examples of viral social media campaigns. By examining each one closely, you can increase the odds of coming up with social media marketing campaigns that have the potential to go viral.
1. ALS Ice Bucket Challenge
The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge (IBC) first made the rounds in 2014. The campaign’s goal was to raise awareness about amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and increase the annual funding for Lou Gehrig’s disease research.
What They Did
The campaign got its start when Chris Kennedy was nominated by his friend to participate in the challenge. The Ice Bucket Challenge initially had no connections with ALS until Kennedy selected the ALS Association because he had a relative who was suffering from the disease.
Kennedy posted the video that started a domino effect in July 2014. What started out as a challenge between friends quickly became a global phenomenon.
Afterward, Kennedy nominated his cousin Jeanette Senerchia. In support of Jeanette’s husband, Kennedy dumped a bucket of ice water on his head and challenged his network to either do the same or donate to combat ALS. Pat Quinn, who was newly diagnosed with ALS, took up the challenge and passed it on to Pete Frates, who was diagnosed with ALS at 27 years old.
Five years after the challenge became a viral hit (2019), the ALS Association was able to significantly increase its funding by 187%. The campaign helped raise $115 million, with more than 17 million participating in the Ice Bucket Challenge, including Oprah, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Steven Spielberg.
Thanks @JonBullas. You're up next @KevinAylwin, Jeanette Senerchia and @mattdodson7 #IceBucketChallenge http://t.co/3jKEwvaxA2
— Chris Kennedy (@ckgolfsrq) July 15, 2014
What We Can Learn from the Campaign
The Ice Bucket Challenge is one of the best examples of an organic movement. Despite its humble beginnings, it resonated with a community that was dealing with this debilitating disease.
The campaign utilized the audience’s network to pass on the challenge from one person to another. The novelty of pouring a bucket of ice-cold water on your head also captured the attention of audiences worldwide and played a big role in encouraging them to take part in the challenge to raise awareness for ALS.
Here are some of the factors that have helped the campaign become a huge success. Consider incorporating these into your future social media marketing campaigns to make them more impactful.
- Open to everyone: At its core, the Ice Bucket Challenge had a simple premise—dump a bucket of cold water on your head. Participants didn’t need a complex setup, nor did they need to come from a specific background. The target audience was anyone with a platform who could share their take on the challenge online, from regular people to big names like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. Furthermore, the campaign focused on awareness rather than money, and participants enjoyed taking on the challenge that supported a worthy cause.
- Shareability: The challenge allowed people from all walks of life to put their own spin on it. From selfies to short videos, participants made personalized content they could easily share online.
- Engaging call-to-action: The challenge had a clear and compelling call-to-action: pour a bucket of water on your head and nominate three other people to take up the challenge. Aside from being clear and engaging, the CTA also had a sense of urgency that encouraged people to take immediate action.
- Strategic use of hashtags: The campaign used simple hashtags like #ALSIceBucketChallenge and #StrikeOutALS. They made it easier for people to search for the challenge online and learn more about it.
2. Spotify Wrapped
Spotify Wrapped is a personalized wrap-up of songs or podcasts you listened to the most for the past year, and people kept talking about it long after it was released. Keywords like “Spotify Wrapped” made the rounds online, and it even has its own official hashtag (#SpotifyWrapped).
Spotify Wrapped first came out in 2017, but an earlier iteration was released back in 2015 and was then known as “Year in Music.” The 2015 version allowed Spotify users to look back on the songs and artists they listened to the most during the past year and included statistics that showed users what their most played songs were and how many hours they spent listening to music.
What They Did
Spotify used in-app data to offer a personalized experience to users. The digital music service also made Spotify Wrapped easily shareable online, which many users took advantage of by sharing their wrap-up on Facebook, X, and Instagram.
Since its launch, Spotify has continued to introduce a number of new features to make the campaign more engaging. A year after it first debuted, Year in Music included a personalized playlist and was rebranded into Spotify Wrapped.
In 2017, Spotify allowed artists and producers to get user metrics for the past year. The following year, it debuted in more markets until it became a built-in feature in the Spotify app. In 2020, Spotify included an Instagram-like stories feature that allowed users to easily share their Wrapped results online.
Last year, Spotify Wrapped went live in 170 markets and was released in over 35 languages. Spotify also created a more personalized Wrapped experience for users. Last year’s Wrapped showed users how their relationship with their favorite artists changed over time. It also included a new “Sound Town” feature, which showed users which cities shared the same taste profile to them.
What We Can Learn from the Campaign
In 2019, the campaign received nearly 3 billion streams. On X alone, users posted about Wrapped more than 1.2 million times. Plus, many big names joined the Wrapped bandwagon, including BTS and Taylor Swift.
In 2022, the audience for Wrapped grew even bigger. More than 156 million people engaged with Spotify Wrapped, and the campaign saw a 17% increase in total engagements.
Below are some helpful insights that you can use to create highly engaging social media marketing campaigns for your brand.
- Leverage data: As hinted at earlier, data plays a crucial role in creating personalized experiences. Use your data in such a way that you’re helping your audience learn more about themselves, their habits, or preferences.
- Provide value: Another component that makes Spotify Wrapped so successful is that it provides value to users without asking them for anything in return. They only need to use Spotify to take part in the campaign and share their Wrapped results—that’s it. Plus, there’s the added bonus of making Wrapped results easily shareable, with users being able to do so directly from the Spotify app.
- Encourage community: Spotify made it easy for users to share their Spotify Wrapped results. The ease of use on top of the personalized summary encouraged users to share their musical journey with their network, organically driving up engagement. As the world’s most popular audio streaming service, Spotify has more than 615 million users worldwide, out of which 239 million are subscribers. The company capitalized on getting users to promote their service for free via the viral Spotify Wrapped campaign. Having hundreds of millions of subscribers translates to millions of free promotions for Spotify. The company also leveraged FOMO and exclusivity. About 60% of millennials make a purchase because of the fear of missing out. By creating a campaign that promotes these two concepts, you’re able to convert potential customers because they don’t want to feel like they’re missing out on an experience.
- Go for eye-catching graphics: Spotify Wrapped makes use of stunning graphics and provides users with great UX. Consider incorporating stunning artwork or graphics into your own campaigns. Also, pay attention to your UI/UX design so you can deliver a better experience for your audience.
3. Apple – Study With Me
In 2023, Apple joined the “Study With Me” trend. It had a simple premise: you watched other people study in real time. What made it so appealing to audiences was that Study With Me videos created a sense of companionship and helped people study.
What They Did
Apple created a 90-minute video featuring the actress Storm Reid. In the video, you can see Reid using the Pomodoro technique to help her stay focused on studying. Aside from being a relatable video, the campaign also serves as a showcase that highlights the capabilities of the 15-inch Macbook Air. To date, the video has over 19 million views on YouTube.
What We Can Learn from the Campaign
Apple used a popular format to connect with its audience (the Study With Me trend). They also worked with a well-known personality to create relatable content. Apple managed to create a campaign that offered real value to its target audience (students). By showcasing a helpful study technique, Apple’s audience was able to take away helpful tips on how they can improve their study habits.
Here are some tips on how you can apply similar concepts to your marketing campaign.
- Identify a specific audience. You can easily generate ideas for your campaign when you center it around a specific niche. A good start would be identifying the kind of people who would benefit the most from your campaign. In Apple’s case, they catered their new product’s marketing to students and how their new Macbook Air could help them in their day-to-day activities.
- Relate to your target audience. Work with content creators to whom your target audience can relate. In Apple’s case, they worked with Reid, a USC junior at that time.
- Provide value. Apple’s marketing included helpful tools like an in-video Pomodoro timer. They provided something valuable to their target audience while still focused on their product’s capabilities.
- Optimize campaign timing. Launch your marketing efforts to coincide with peak interest times for your target audience. Apple released their back-to-school campaign just before the school year, maximizing engagement and relevance during a period when students are most attentive to such messaging.
4. Patagonia – Leveraging UGC for Effective Campaigns
Patagonia is known for creating content that’s centered around a message or the company’s mission.
The company, which is known for being very vocal about its sustainability mission, has launched several programs to support this. For instance, its Worn Wear program promotes extending the lifespan of its products through repair, which also helps minimize consumption. Through this program, participants can trade in their used Patagonia clothing or gear and receive up to 50% of the resale price through store credit. This strategy is great for building consumer trust and ensuring customer retention. It resonates with the company’s target audience, who are typically environmentally conscious consumers who prefer buying products from a company that promotes and embodies sustainability.
Some of the company’s featured content include a TikTok video focusing on the importance of recycling, as well as Instagram posts that raise awareness about protests against fossil fuel.
@patagonia Reduce, Repair, Reuse all come before Recycle at Patagonia, but that hasn’t deterred us from using recycled materials in 98% of our line this season. It all counts. Excerpt from the film “Why Recycled” on Patagonia.com #sustainability #recycle #film #consumerism ♬ original sound - Patagonia
What They Did
Patagonia continues to leverage user-generated content to create campaigns that encourage support for their causes. They don’t use Facebook to promote their products. Instead, the company is careful when it comes to choosing which platforms to use to engage with its target audience.
What We Can Learn from the Campaign
If you’re planning to do something like Patagonia’s campaigns, consider focusing on your product’s value. Showcase how your products or services are helping you support your advocacies. While you’re at it, highlight user-generated content that aligns with your mission.
Some other things worth noting from the Patagonia campaigns include:
- Focus on marketing to a specific audience: Patagonia is known for supporting a range of sustainability efforts. Its campaigns focus on driving awareness for relevant causes and environmental issues. These types of campaigns cater to a very specific audience type. You can do something similar by tailoring your approach to resonate with a particular audience segment.
- Tap into a range of emotions: Social causes and environmental issues cause people to feel strongly about certain things. Patagonia makes use of bold campaigns that stay true to the company’s sustainability mission. For instance, the Worn Wear campaign helped the company achieve an 88% market sell-through rate. What makes it even more compelling is that the company is encouraging customers to also share stories of how they repaired and reused their worn Patagonia products. When you visit the Patagonia website, you’ll also notice that the product descriptions aren’t focused on hard selling. Instead, the company uses product descriptions to tell people what it’s doing to promote sustainability. This helps solidify Patagonia’s reputation as a company that cares about the environment and the quality of its products. Create campaigns that touch on your audience’s emotions. Dove’s Real Beauty Sketches campaign is a great example of this. It was relatable and had a wide emotional appeal that, in the end, helped people feel inspired.
5. Ocean Spray – “Dreams”
In 2020, a TikTok video of a man on his longboard while drinking Ocean Spray Cran-Raspberry and singing to Dreams by Fleetwood Mac became a viral sensation. It was such a big hit that even Fleetwood Mac’s own Mick Fleetwood replicated the viral video on his Instagram account. Even Tom Hayes, the CEO of Ocean Spray, joined in on the fun.
@420doggface208♬ Dreams (2004 Remaster) - Fleetwood Mac
What They Did
Ocean Spray didn’t come up with this viral hit. It was one of the best examples of the power of user-generated content. Instead of a brand taking control of the narrative, Apodaca, in his own way, showed the world what the brand is in an original, authentic, and uplifting way—which was something that the world needed during the pandemic.
The company also didn’t immediately jump into the fray. Instead, the company sat back for a while and let things unfold.
The video racked up almost 26 million views (currently, it has more than 93 million views) on the platform, which prompted Ocean Spray to respond by gifting Nathan Apodaca with a truck filled with Ocean Spray products. Apodaca and Ocean Spray weren’t the only ones who benefited from this viral video. In 2021, Fleetwood Mac’s sales for Dreams jumped to 374%. After the video went viral, the average daily use of the song grew to 1,380%. And 33 years after its release, Dreams jumped to the number 1 spot on the iTunes charts.
What We Can Learn from the Campaign
The year 2020 wasn’t exactly the best of times, and this video gave audiences around the world something refreshing. It was authentic—it wasn’t a publicity stunt—and played a role in boosting Ocean Spray’s brand affinity. The video also helped the company connect with a much younger audience by leveraging TikTok.
- Leverage authentic content. While Nathan’s video wasn’t Ocean Spray’s idea, they benefited from the existing engagement by contacting and rewarding the creator. If your brand is big enough for people to talk about online, you can leverage their content by engaging with the creator and finding a way to collaborate with them.
- Find new audiences. Ocean Spray found a new potential market through Nathan’s viral hit. While you may have a preconceived idea of who your target audience is, seeing how people online engage with your product may reveal new audiences you didn’t expect.
6. Oreo Super Bowl Blackout Ad
When a power outage happened during the Super Bowl XLVII in 2013, no one expected it to become a jumping-off point for a viral campaign.
What They Did
The digital marketing team behind this viral social media campaign, 360i, crafted the now iconic tweet, “Power Out? No Problem.” This was accompanied by an image of a solitary Oreo cookie, with the caption, “You can still dunk in the dark.”
It was all about speed. The agency had a 15-person team composed of copywriters, a strategist, and artists ready to respond to all events that happened during the Super Bowl. As soon as the lights went out, the team, headed by Leo Morejon, quickly went into creating content. Within minutes, they posted the above-mentioned tweet. As soon as it went live, the tweet caught on quickly. Within an hour, it had 10,000+ retweets, more than 18,000 likes, and over 5,000 shares. It also won several awards, including the Cannes Lions and CLIO Awards.
Power out? No problem. pic.twitter.com/dnQ7pOgC
— OREO Cookie (@Oreo) February 4, 2013
What We Can Learn from the Campaign
The most surprising thing about this tweet was that it wasn’t the first one to use the Super Bowl blackout to its advantage. Other brands like Calvin Klein were able to post a few minutes ahead of Oreo. However, this particular tweet still managed to capture the audience's attention and win them over.
The team behind the Super Bowl blackout tweet used real-time marketing and social media agility to their advantage. By capitalizing on such an unexpected event and coming up with a real-time response, they ended up with something that quickly became a viral sensation.
What Makes a Social Media Campaign Go Viral?
Social media plays a major role in making marketing campaigns go viral. That’s when your message or content gets shared widely by your target audience that its reach gets into everyone else’s feed.
However, for many marketers, going viral isn’t their main objective. Marketers want to drive brand awareness, get high-quality leads and new customers, and boost brand engagement.
The Problem with Viral Marketing
While viral marketing may help you reach a wider audience and drive brand awareness, it’s not a silver bullet that will help you achieve all your marketing goals. Going viral isn’t something that you can force or control. Viral content also struggles with longevity.
The half-life of social media posts, or the time it takes for them to receive half of their total engagement, varies from one platform to another. Below are the half-life of social media posts on major platforms:
- X – 43 minutes
- Facebook – 76 minutes (1.27 hours)
- Instagram – 1,185 minutes (19.75 hours)
- YouTube – 12,717 minutes (211.95 hours or almost nine days)
On TikTok, if your content doesn’t go viral, then it’s pretty much dead. That’s because it gets most of its views within the first few minutes after being published. If you publish content that doesn’t entertain 90% of TikTok users, chances are, it’s not going to get enough mileage.
Here’s something that’s also worth noting: a campaign can go viral but for the wrong reasons. Take, for example, Mountain Dew’s 2016 “PuppyMonkeyBaby” commercial to promote MTN Dew Kickstart. The original YouTube video has been made private, but you can still check out an embedded video of the now-iconic Super Bowl 50 commercial here.
When it first aired in 2016, the commercial received a lot of polarizing feedback. For a large corporation, this might be something they can brush off easily (and maybe even use its shock value to their advantage), but if you’re running a small business, the backlash could do some damage to your brand.
I need a plushie or action figure of #puppymonkeybaby seriously! It's crazy! https://t.co/ktABU4A01w
— Doc_Gamer (@Doc_Gamer) February 7, 2016
Elements of a Viral Social Media Marketing Campaign
Strategic viral marketing enables brands to greatly expand their reach and make their product or service stand out. Before diving into what makes some social media campaigns become viral sensations, you need to understand that viral marketing is rooted in word-of-mouth marketing. The impact and reach of a campaign are amplified as it’s recommended by your audience using online channels.
For you to create a campaign that may potentially become a hit, it needs to be:
- Creative and unexpected. Audiences crave something new or different. Making a creative and unexpected campaign allows your brand to stand out and get noticed by your target audience. Give them something awe-inspiring, funny, or thought-provoking.
- Able to capture your audience’s attention. A good campaign should be scroll-stopping. You only have 10 seconds to capture your customers’ attention. Note that the time it takes to grab their attention will vary, depending on what their search intent is.
- Engaging. One thing that viral campaigns have in common is that they invite audiences to interact with the content through comments or likes. They’re also easy to share online.
- Appeal to your audience’s emotions. A good social media campaign should elicit a strong emotional response from your audience. Whether it makes your audience laugh or cry, a good campaign should make an impact and encourage people to engage.
- Posted on the right platform. Viral social media campaigns need to gain traction and a wide audience. Thus, they need to be shared repeatedly. Know which platforms work best for your particular target audience, as this tells you where your content will be most likely to be viewed and shared. Analyze your audience demographics and determine which social platform best matches the profile of your audience base. For instance, if you’re targeting a Gen Z audience, then it would be better to try a viral campaign on TikTok, Snapchat, or Instagram instead of on Facebook. If you’re doing a visual or video campaign, opt for platforms like YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram instead of X.
- Simple. This refers to your campaign’s message. Your audience should be able to clearly understand what you’re trying to say. Refrain from having overarching messages that could confuse your audience and reduce the effectiveness of your social media campaigns. Note that just because your message should be simple doesn’t mean that you should limit your campaign’s creativity. The Egg campaign in 2019 is a good example of this. Its goal was to beat Kylie Jenner’s record (18 million likes) and get more likes on Instagram, which it managed to do with over 54 million likes.
Conclusion
If you want to make campaigns that will become a big hit, you also need to embrace data, and one way for you to tell which posts have traction and wide reach is to look at your data. This will give you insights about what type of content resonates with your audience and beyond.
The thing with viral social media campaigns is that they just happen. There’s no planning for it or a formula you could follow. The good news is that you can use the strategies discussed in this article to create high-quality campaigns that have a higher potential to go viral.
However (and this might sound contradictory), more than focusing on creating campaigns that will potentially become a massive hit, it’s more important to create campaigns that provide value to your target audience. Focus on creating campaigns that also allow you to drive brand awareness, build your authority, and create affinity with your audience.
