Over the past few years big brands have become more reliant on social media than ever before. As we love all things digital, we know how important social media can be for your marketing campaigns so we have compiled what we believe are the Top 5 Brands Who Are Smashing Social Media

#5 Amazon

During the Christmas period Amazon used Snapchat to their full advantage by sending 10 second clips of their flash sales before Black Friday and their busiest shopping period. It was a great effort to boost their mobile sales and definitely worked. Amazon customers ordered more than five toys per second using their mobile devices.

#4 Oreo

Now we know Oreo aren’t renowned for their use of social media. However during the Super Bowl, there was a black out to which led to millions of social media users going into a frenzy, Oreo took full advantage of the power cut and released a campaign “Don’t worry. You can still dunk in the dark”. The campaign went viral immediately, including business posts blogging on how clever and fast thinking their campaign was.

#3 Adidas

Adidas are a brand who always have a new and innovative sportswear campaign. But during the London tube strikes, they took their social media campaigning to a new level. Their boost London campaign involved getting inhabitants of London to post their picture and tag #boostLondon to show they ran or walked to work instead of being delayed by the lack of transport.

#2 Dove

The Dove ‘real beauty’ campaign has been around for a while, but it still thrives on their social media. The campaign is mainly via YouTube and involved women describing themselves to an FBI sketch artist, then another person describing them to the same artist. It was to show that women are their own worst beauty critics and to make women feel empowered. As you can imagine women all over loved the campaign which is probably why it is still so successful today.

#1 Tesco Mobile

I think everybody knew that Tesco Mobile would be the winner as their social media campaigns are proving more effective than ever, especially their twitter account. Tesco mobile is regularly shunned as being “uncool” with the youth. So they have targeted the youth through their hilarious ‘banter’ over their twitter account. From dissing the users who insults with witty comebacks, to provoking o2 into  a rap battle, their twitter account followers just soars higher every day, and now so do their sales.

Although all of our examples are large brands with massive exposure. There is no reason you can’t make the most out of your social media. The key thing to take away from this article is not how many followers each of the brands have, it is how each brand has seen an opportunity arise, and either they or their marketing agency have been innovative enough to take the opportunity to social media and gain astonishing results from this. If you would like any help with your social media or marketing just give us a call.

Most people like spending time with their families at Christmas, we do too, but one of our favourite times at Christmas is waiting to see what our favourite brands have in store for their Christmas marketing campaigns.

Take a look at what some of the big brands are doing this Christmas to win the nation's hearts.

John Lewis- everybody loves John Lewis at Christmas, their warm, fuzzy campaigns know exactly how to get people obsessed. This year involved the loveable Monty the Penguin and his human friend Sam, @MontythePenguin had over 34,000 followers on Twitter and was humanized through his tweets about his daily life giving him his own social presence, before launching their range of Monty merchandise.

Marks & Spencers - Another campaign that knows how to use Christmas spirit to its full advantage. The “two fairies” campaign used by M&S has not only been trending due to its wonderful TV advertisement, it has become a twitter phenomenon through its use of competitions and blog posts from the fairies, involving them sending a range of beauty and food products as Christmas gifts.

Coca Cola- Probably THE most famous Christmas campaign, the Coca Cola advert is always released earlier than most competing brands, meaning it leaves viewers thinking ‘yes! it must be nearly time for Christmas’ every cold November. This year their social strategy involved creating a Christmas jumper on their website and posting it to their social media account to get votes so that they could in fact win the real version of their custom made Christmas jumper.

Just because you don’t have the exposure or the budget to product such a mass campaign, ask yourself, What campaigns are you running to excel your business this Christmas?

If you need any help with your marketing ideas, just give one of us a call.

People try and create innovative marketing solutions on a regular basis to boost their sales and brand awareness. However many businesses fail to realise that market research is just as important as the overall execution.

We have compiled a list of what we believe are the top 5 biggest marketing failures.

#5 Vitaminwater their marketing failure came when they launched their marketing campaign based on the idea of playing off Canada’s bilingualism by jumbling English and French words on the bottle caps of Vitaminwater. Everything ran smoothly until the phrase “you retard” happened to appear on the lid of a young woman’s drink, a young woman who happened to have a half-sister with cerebral palsy.

#4 Jagermeister due to being a brand targeted at young party go-ers, Jagermeister decided to sponsor a rather large pool party featuring plenty of the bottles in the hands of the guests. To add to the “vibe” they wanted to create a cool mist coming from the water so they decided to add liquid nitrogen to the water. A little market research would have told them that when the substance is mixed with chlorine, it produces are harmful toxin. Safe to say the pool was cleared in no time.

#3 Mcdonalds this is probably the biggest brand to make such a big marketing mistake. Despite the success of McDonalds’ previous campaigns, they decided to launch marketing specifically to the Big Mac. The campaign pictured a dark background with a very distressed woman crying into her hands with the text ‘You are not alone.’ Followed with the much smaller print ‘Millions of people love the Big Mac too’. Now obviously making a joke of mental illness/abuse never goes down well, no matter how established your brand is.

#2 Dr Pepper Now this case is more of a social media fail, but marketing none the less. When the Guns and Roses announced their album Chinese Democracy in 1994, it still hadn’t been launched by 2008. Dr Pepper took an opportunity to portray themselves as cool music-lovers by stating if the album is released by the end of the year they will give a free can of Dr Pepper to every single American. Less than eight months later the album was released and Dr Pepper did not have the means to provide so many free products, or a way of claiming them. They hastily launched a website which crashed immediately. FAIL.

#1 Hoover This is by far the biggest marketing fail of all time as you probably know. Hoover was carrying a large surplus stock of vacuum cleaners and needed to sell them immediately to free up space. They launched an offer where if customers spent more than £100 on products they would win free airline tickets, first round Europe, then expanded to USA. Customer responses overwhelmed the company and Hoover had not anticipated the chaos that was to come.

At 22, we know how important it is to create a marketing campaign that not only gives you brand awareness, but is researched and executed in a professional manner that creates no back lash, or fiascos… Simply a brilliant marketing campaign.

The debate between which is a better advertising tool, digital or print, has been ongoing. Loving all things digital you’d think we’d biased but we’re not.

Previous research revealed that advertising impact can be just as powerful on a tablet as in print advertisement, but both must carry over the look and feel of the original news brand.

The pleasure and intensity of reading is fairly the same in both formats but it is more likely to portray ideas and originality in a digital format whereas print is recognised more for credibility.

One of the biggest factors that should play part in whether you advertise online or in print is the fact digital readers are more likely to interact with the ads, clicking through to another action to experience further content.

Online ads really can get the message across to your potential customers, offering the opportunity to interact with more information, and increase the likeliness of consumers purchasing your services. However readers who consume both print and online are more aware of the advertisements, and consequently have a better brand recall.

At 22 we believe you should be proactive in how you get your message across. Using a variety of advertisement means to suit your target audience is key. Sending out a copy of the same content both digitally and in print format, or even just with a printable download can increase effectiveness depending on who you are trying to reach.