The rapid growth of social media has made it common for unique and innovative ad campaigns to appear on a regular basis. Hiring an advertising agency, with an emphasis in social media outreach, is a crucial make or break for your brand.

Some of these have been hugely successful, and some not so successful. Due to the constant evolution of social media platforms, however, testing and tweaking any campaign is always essential. Let’s take a look at three social media campaigns that have created a real stir.

1. ‘Do Us A Flavor’ – Lay’s

Lay’s the popular chip maker, created a great crowd sourcing campaign as part of their 75th anniversary. Through a highly successful interactive campaign, they offered people the chance to create a new flavor for their potato chips.

Followers were given the chance to submit their own flavors via their Facebook page, with a couple of well known celebrities – Eva Longoria, and Michael Symon – choosing the winners. Not only is this a great way to create crowd interaction, but it gave the winners either $1 million as first prize, or 1% of the total sales of the new flavor over 2013 – whichever turns out to be bigger.

2. ‘Timeline Scavenger Hunt’ – Red Bull

The Facebook timeline changed the layout and setup of Facebook overnight – and this had a real effect on brands and how they branded themselves on the social media platform.

Red Bull, however, took this as a great opportunity to do something new, and started a timeline scavenger hunt that gave their fans the chance to explore the company’s history. Fans would have to find clues through their timeline to unlock additional clues that they could then explore.

Tougher clues would create the viral effect of bringing fans together as they tried to find a solution to benefit them all and open the next section. Not only did this create a fun, interactive hunt for fans to experience; it exposed them throughout to the numerous sports and entertainment activities that Red Bull sponsor.

3. ‘Celebrating 1 Million Fans’ – Cadbury

Cadbury uses social media a lot, but found that only about 16% of their many Facebook fans ever actually saw the social media activities they were getting up to.

To counter this, and to increase their fan participation and involvement, they started a new campaign to celebrate reaching 1 million fans. In order to test out what their fans would enjoy and engage with, the company created an enormous Facebook ‘like’ thumb from bits of their chocolate bars. They used teasers to build up this event and then created a live stream of the build. The result? An extra 40,000 fans joined during the campaign and over 350,000 got involved during the process. Hugely innovative and very successful in achieving exactly what they wanted.

The use of social media will continue to lead to the creation of interesting and involving campaigns for fans to enjoy. Interaction is key and social media is a wonderful tool for helping brands both spread their message, and re-invigorate their current following.