Ten years ago, Jack Dorsey sent the first ever tweet. Since then, the platform has become a cultural and political sensation, though not one without growing pains, from internet twitter bullies to bad commenters.
Marketing Week teamed up with social intelligence company BrandWatch to come up with a list of 10 most impactful campaigns on Twitter over the past decade:
#YesWeCan Obama Election Campaign 2008
The #YesWeCan hashtag has been strongly associated with Barack Obama’s 2008 election campaign, but in fact less than 3,000 people actually used the hashtag with a total mentions of 2,600 in the three-month (01 Aug–30 Nov) run up to the campaign, despite 69.5 million Obama voters who likely knew the slogan. The biggest hit occurred on November 5th in reaction to Obama’s acceptance speech.
#BeatCancer by Livestrong 2011
Having gained close to 210,000 mentions in 24 hours during the 2009 campaign, this was dwarfed by 459,000 mentions and 1.67 billion impressions beating its own Guinness World Record for the ‘Most Widespread Social Networking Message’ from 1 Aug – 30 Nov 2010. PayPal and SWAGG donated $0.05 for every mention with the hashtag to cancer charities. Celebrity tweeters on the message included Khloe and Kim Kardashian, Ariana Grande etc.
#WantAnR8 by Audi 2011
Inspired by a tweet in response to their Super Bowl advert, Audi launched a campaign encouraging consumers to be creative in letting them know why they wanted to drive the brand new R8 from 01 Sept – 30 Nov 2011. The lucky social media winner would get the keys to an Audi R8 for a day. Ultimately, not only did the winner of the competition get an R8 for the day, so did the social media-savvy Super Bowl fan who inspired the campaign with her #WantAnR8 tweet with 27,000 mentions.
Other campaigns are
#40Dollars by The White House
01 Dec 2011 – 28 Feb 2012
Total mentions: 62,000
#ShareACoke by Coca-Cola
01 Apr 2013 – 31 Aug 2013
Total mentions: 160,000
@TweetACoffee by Starbucks
01 Oct 2013 – 31 Dec 2013
Total mentions: 122,650
#nomakeupselfie by Cancer Research UK
01 March 2014 – 31 May 2014
Total mentions: 160,000
Number of impressions: 936.5 million
#IceBucketChallenge by ALS Association
01 June – 30th September 2014
Total mentions: 9,578,772
The Ice Bucket Challenge, sometimes called the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, is an activity involving dumping a bucket of ice water on someone’s head to promote awareness of the disease Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis.
#LikeAGirl by Always
01 June 2014 – 31 Aug 2014
Total mentions: 169,000
#ThisGirlCan by Sport England
01 Jan 2015 – 31 Mar 2015
Total mentions: 180,000