5 Valentine’s Day Social Media Campaigns We Love

Valentine’s Day is this week and brands are showing the love already. It’s time for romantic stories to make the front page of Reddit and HARO pitches about relationships. As a social media marketer I’m on the hunt for the perfect Valentine’s Day social media campaign, here are a few favorites.

1. Evian #iloveyoulike I’m a sucker for social media campaigns that tell stories and are visual. This does both. Evian is running a Social Media campaign for Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram. They ask you to complete this sentence, “I love you like…”.

Tweet ‪#‎ILoveYouLike‬ to @evianLoveBot and they’ll respond with a Valentine’s message, like the one below, to share with your sweetheart (until February 16th). Except when we tried it we learned @evianLoveBot got suspended, so just use the hashtag and cross your fingers!

To make it fun there will also be fun prizes. 2. #rejectedcandyhearts on Twitter This one isn’t backed by a brand but is still an example of stellar storytelling. Anyone can create a picture of a candy heart with their own offbeat wish and share it with the hashtag. What’s great about this one is that it’s become a tradition. Brands put a lot of work into campaigns, why not make one like that can be recycled?

@KngHnryVIII made a special #rejectedcandyhearts for each of his six wives and this one…

3. DegreeSearch’s Nerdy Valentines

For two years in a row, DegreeSearch created their own nerdy Valentines. They are so well done they could literally be printed off and handed out. last year we created 3 posts of Nerdy Valentines. I reached out to Joseph LeBaron to get more details. “We decided to break the posts up into series of 5 images. The first one was received so well immediately that we kept it going.” Notice the number of pins, there was definitely love from Pinterest. This makes sense also because women are more likely to talk about Valentine’s Day and according to data from Pew research, women love social media more than men, and it’s especially noticeable on Pinterest. Here are the numbers:

Nerdy Valentines-Part one

Likes – 94

Tweet – 24

Pin It – 41K

G+ – 26

Traffic: 12,291 visitors (a small part of that is a resurgence this year)

Nerdy Valentines-Part two

Likes – 47

Tweet – 16

Pin it – 1K

G+ – 13

Traffic: 2,271

Nerdy Valentines-Part three

Likes – 41

Tweets – 5

Pin it – 2K

G+ 11

Traffic: 2,179

They also did a roundup of other people’s valentines which brought more traffic and shares (though significantly less than the originals).

4. Milk-Bone #sayitwithmilkbone Blogger Campaign

Milk-Bone chose 10 bloggers who love animals to make Valentine’s Day crafts using the dog treats and display the project on their blog. In addition the bloggers helped spread the word about contests. There was a Twitter party too. Specially marked boxes of Milk-Bone biscuits have a special red dog bone that says “LOVE” on it and a code. You enter the code on a landing page and if you’re lucky you could win a year’s supply of Milk-Bone biscuits plus some cash.

5. Nutrimill Bosch for the love of whole grain Facebook giveaway

This one could be adapted to love for just about any brand. It’s fairly simple and runs for a week even though there is just one big prize. Each day there’s a new finalist and one of them wins a NutriMill Grain Mill on Valentine’s Day. To enter, they ask a lot. You have to LIKE their page, comment on the posts about the contest, like the post, and SHARE the post. It’s working at driving engagement though, with an average of over 64,000 people reached per day.

They feature the day’s finalist on an image about the contest, which personalizes the contest and gives them another chance to remind people to enter.