As this is a post about the best social media campaigns during Easter, it’s important that you know it will contain many puns. From “egg-cellent” to “have a hoppy Easter”, there is no shame here. 

Now, onto the good stuff. 

Along with the festive season, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Independence Day, St. Patrick’s Day and, erm, the Super Bowl, Easter is one of the big hitters on a marketer’s calendar. With Good Friday, Easter Sunday and Easter Monday making up the holiday, it’s also a chance to get a little more juice out of campaigns. 

With social media being such an effective platform for engaging with audiences, it makes sense that marketers up and down the country focus on running campaigns during the Easter holidays. 

In celebrations of all things eggs-cellent, here are some of the best social media campaigns that focus on the Easter holidays.

Read on, and find out which brands took their social media game to a new level at Easter. And don’t forget to have a hoppy Easter yourself. 

Why Social Media?

Engagements on social media during holiday seasons often provide a spike, and Easter is no different. The below chart shows Facebook engagements between February and May 2017. It’s clear to see that Easter saw a massive spike for people engaging.

Social media acts as an efficient and cost-effective way to be creative over Easter. Even if you’re not a chocolate brand or supermarket, you can still jump on the Easter bandwagon and create fun and interesting content that resonates with your audience. 

Whether it’s a competition, promoting user-generated content or creating clever puns, utilize social media platforms to maximize your reach. 

Just like these brands did…

1) Mashable, Crafty Eggs

Over the last five-or-so years, content marketing has skyrocketed, becoming a regular staple in many brand’s communications outreaches. User-generated content is part of content marketing and is a bona fide way for companies to interact with their audiences on a deeper level. After all, 93% of consumers find UGC helpful when making a buying decision. 

In 2014, Mashable, the digital media website, decided to involve its audience during the Easter holidays. So they created the #CraftyEggs campaign, which saw people sending videos of uniquely decorated Easter eggs via social media.Mashable then included the best designs in their follow-up posts, thus increasing their content distribution and getting their audience more involved with the brand. They also used some of the decorated eggs for Vine clips (one vid had 29k loops) to boost their following on the now-defunct social media video app.

Key Takeaway

Getting your audience to provide content is one of the best ways to generate more engagement. Mashable combined egg painting (a popular Easter holiday activity) with UGC and created a campaign on social media that got everyone egg-static.

2) Sainsbury’s, Egg Roller

Over the years, Snapchat has become a formidable social media platform—especially among younger demographics. While it’s not easy for brands to utilize Snapchat, the ones that do it successfully reap the rewards. Enter Sainsbury’s, the UK-based supermarket chain, and their Egg Roller campaign. The concept was simple enough: a mobile-only game that involved players rolling an Easter egg down a hill and trying to avoid obstacles by tilting their phone.

Simplicity can often result in success, and the campaign garnered 14.5 million impressions, enjoyed a reach of six million and clocked up a total of 928 hours of gameplay amongst users. It’s safe to say that Sainsbury’s foray in Snapchat was a successful one—and the Easter holidays played a considerable role.  

Key Takeaway

The chocolate-giving element of Easter is particularly popular with younger people, and Sainsbury’s tapped into that demographic perfectly with a fun game that got people interacting. When you combine technology with social media, there’s an excellent chance that you’re on your way to a winning formula. 

 

3) Haribo UK, Starmix Competition

Easter is all about the chocolate, which means that you should stay away if you’re in the sweets game, right? If that is the case, nobody told Haribo, the sweet confectionary brand who created the #HuntTheDoubleYolker campaign. 

Using both social media and real-life packets of sweets, Haribo challenged people to find the  ‘double yolker’ sweets in their limited edition packs of Starmix. Through social media, they promoted the campaign to their followers and encouraged them to visit shops that sold Starmix and try their luck.

The competition, which was based in the UK and Ireland, offered the lucky people that find the rare double yolk sweet a free holiday to Forest Holidays, who offer cabin breaks in some of the UK’s most idyllic countryside settings.

Key Takeaway

Competitions are great for generating a bit of extra juice and interactivity to your campaign, but partnering with another brand can really  maximize your reach across two sets of followers. By teaming up with Forest Holidays, Haribo added another layer to their campaign.

4) Cadbury, Live Easter Egg Hunt

If you come at the king, you best not miss. And Cadbury’s is the king of brands when it comes to Easter. Each year, they have created a memorable marketing campaign, from Loch Ness Eggs to “Bunny’s Been Busy”. 

In 2018, they teamed up with Facebook360 and Ogilvy Melbourne to create a virtual reality social media marketing campaign. Using 360-degree Facebook videos, users took part in the first ever Facebook video Easter Egg hunt. 

All you had to do to take part was log on to Facebook and use the 360-degree feature video to scan virtual landscapes and look for hidden Easter eggs. The first person to find the egg and leave a comment was awarded a real-life chocolate prize.

Key Takeaway

Cadbury’s left no corner unturned for their 2018 Easter campaign, offering younger audiences the chance to win a real-life chocolate egg while participating in a fun game on Facebook—one of the world’s most popular and relevant social media platforms.

5) emoov, Choccy Giveaway

Sometimes the simplest of ideas can also prove to be the most effective, especially if executed properly. Emoov is an online real estate agent where people buy and sell homes without the need for a physical realtor. 

To celebrate Easter and increase exposure, they launched a competition on Facebook, asking people to like and share the post. The prize? An assortment of chocolate Easter treats for one winner picked at random.

Engagements were more than triple the usual amount, with over 200 likes, more than 400 comments and more than 300 shares. Sometimes all it takes is a good competition to get people interacting—many of the entrants even posted pictures on the comments, saying on much they wanted the tasty treats. 

Key Takeaway

Going back to basics is often a good idea when done right, and using a competition to increase engagement is a surefire way to enjoy success—as long as the prize get people excited enough to interact. 

6) Ikea, Flat Pack Chocolate Easter Bunny

Furniture and chocolate don’t exactly go hand-in-hand, especially if said chocolate gets spilt on a brand-new couch. However, Ikea wasn’t deterred by the idea of creating a chocolate-based campaign for Easter.

The Swedish furniture maker  is famous for its flat-pack furniture, so they incorporated something synonymous with their brand for Easter. Using social media to get the word out, Ikea let it be known that customers could head to their stores and pick up a, you guessed it, flat-back chocolate bunny.

What is a flat-pack bunny, you ask? It’s a chocolate Easter bunny called Vårkänsla, and comes complete with instructions on how to build the 3D bunny. Ikea also posted several videos across social media to promote the bunny using the clever tagline, “It wouldn’t be Ikea if it didn’t require assembly. 

 

Key Takeaway

There wasn’t a clear fit for Ikea and the Easter holidays, but they managed to include one of their most famous features by being creative and thinking outside of the box. As a result,  people paid attention to Ikea during the Easter holidays. 

7) Mini Boden

Competitions dominate Easter social media campaigns, which makes sense when much so much of the hoo-ha is based around delicious chocolate-y eggs. Mini Boden, the children’s line of the fashion company, Boden, also got in on the Easter social media act with a competition of their own. 

The fashion brand didn’t have an Easter-specific clothing line to promote, but they knew just how much children love Easter eggs. Which is why they created an Easter egg hunt that involved followers using Pinterest and Twitter to find hidden eggs within their website.

Followers had to repin on Boden’s Pinterest board, which was called “Boden’s Easter Egg Hunt”, before needing to find a minimum of eight eggs and also pin those to the board. Boden used Twitter to provide clues and useful updates. 

Key Takeaway

Boden used multiple social media platforms for the same campaign to add a new dynamic to a popular competition during Easter time. Followers used Twitter for clues in the Easter egg hunt and Pinterest once they’d found the eggs.

The Good Eggs

Easter provides a great opportunity for brands to increase their exposure during the holiday season, whether they’re confectionary related or not. The brands featured in this post managed to make themselves relevant through a combination of humour, technology and out-of-the-box thinking, all with the help of social media. 

And that’s all, yolks.