This week our specialists came up with some great case studies and examples of businesses using social media well, and some not so well!

This one great article covers How 2 Small Businesses Are Growing Thanks to Social Media

Birchbox – a monthly sample box service for beauty products is getting it’s word out using video – tutorials, demos and the big one seems to be the actual “unboxing” of the delivery box. The unboxing video – including immediate review – caught on with fans and viewers and now creates tons of unique user generated content for the brand. Here is a recent example of BirchBox demoing a new Home box line, you can see they are low-tech, causal and easy to make but can cause a great deal of buzz!

Orabrush – Again used some quite hilarious videos (check out the one below for a chuckle) and creative, targeted Facebook ads, where to get the attention of Walmart execs they took out Facebook ads accusing Walmart execs of having bad breath. Clever. They are in Walmart now.

Here is a case study on how one photographer grew his Facebook fan page following by 46% by running a contest – and a creatie one at that! He used photos they had already taken from previous weddings and messaged the newlyweds saying  if their image received the most likes they would win a large print of the pic. Now, it was up to the newlyweds to promote the photographer, Facebok page and picture to win!  Click here, for more on the story and some great wedding pics! 

The Lowe’s Instagram contest, while looking like a great concept (once you find it) might be a bit of a case study in what not to do when running a social media campaign. We found out about the campaign through a blog covering the 3 problems with the campaign. (Never a good sign!)

The campaign was supported by a tab on their Facebook page:

But no mention of it on their website, not even an Instagram icon to indicate they were active on the platform.

When you search the hashtag  it looks promising with 28,940 photos …but very quickly you can see that very, very few are related to the Lowe’s campaign – or are even something they would want to be associated with.

The big lesson here: do you hashtag homework. Before launching a hashtag campaign, check to see if it is already being used and how, then pick something that you can own, monitor and track. Hashtags in campaigns are meant to help bring the right people together to share their experiences and stories; a generic and common hashtag cannot do this for you.

Have a great week!