We know you have heard this hundreds of times by now, but we will say it again: "Every business willing to grow must be active on social media." However, posting content weekly or daily and answering fans and followers’ inquiries sometimes isn’t enough. What every brand needs is mastering social media in its own way. To do so, brands should act differently and uniquely. So as a social media agency, we decided to share with you 6 ways that made 6 successful brands on social media:

Smart response: In the last week of August 2016, Skyscanner’s Facebook account became the "talk of the town" due to an astonishing reply to one of its fans. For those who don’t know it, Skyscanner is a search engine for flights, hotels and car hire. Switching back to the story, one of its users found a baffling suggestion when checking for a flight, so he left a "sarcastic" Facebook comment wondering about their weird proposition. What happened next was definitely beyond expectation.

Instead of apologizing for their mistake, Skyscanner replied to the complaining person with a set of funny and smart answers that gathered, in few hours, thousands of likes, and hundreds of comments complementing this great internet win.

Impressive social media presence: With more than 1.2 million followers on Instagram, Airbnb isn’t only good in collecting followers, but is actually the "Best Overall Instagram Presence". This title hasn’t been awarded by our digital agency, but by the 2016 Shorty Awards, a social media award. The reason behind this recognition is their ability to make a great use of Instagram’s core value by posting interesting visual contents. When searching for a vacation home, people often make up their mind according to pictures. And that’s exactly Airbnb’s social media strategy to attract followers and users.

Reaching out to people: Reaching out to people can be an effective way to gain exposure and master social media. Nivea’s activities on Twitter is a great example. This beauty brand look for people tweeting about skin problems in order to help solving them with customized tips. To find such issues, Nivea simply made use of the Twitter search feature without following specific hashtags. Sometimes, there’s no need to think too much or to spend a budget to promote your brand, a smart move can help you do it.

Inspiring people globally: Dove is another great example of a social media success, simply by trying to make the world better. How? Every once in a while, Dove post a new online video campaign to help women feel good about themselves, and each time their video goes viral. Every campaign is associated with a customized hashtag that allows people to directly relate to the brand and the mission. Their campaign "Dove Real Beauty Sketches" ended up to be the most viewed online ad of all time with more than 163 million viewers on Youtube only. The impact of this campaign was translated into millions of people sharing the supportive and positive message behind it.

User-Generated content: GoPro, the cameras company, is using a social media strategy based on user-generated content to promote its products. In other words, the pictures and videos are submitted by the consumers themselves in order to show their products capabilities, and the experience. Depending on the users to promote GoPro products makes the brand extremely interactive. In 2015, GoPro Instagram followers reached 6 million, and was the fourth most engaging brand on the social network.

Following trending news: Don’t we all love Oreo? Whether with their cookies or their social media presence, the cookie company is doing a great job. We all know how Oreo taste, so we will jump to their online presence. As a matter of fact, Oreo created one of the most successful social media campaigns ever. How? To celebrate their 100th birthday, Oreo produced 100 new posts on Facebook for 100 days inspired by trending news. Each post was shared more than 1,400 times on average boosting their engagement by 195% and gathering more than a million Facebook fans. Another great example of benefiting from trending news, is their "You can still dunk in dark" live post during the Super Bowl blackout which got retweeted more than 15,000 times.

In a world where digital competition is growing bigger and bigger, brands must focus on being unique. If you are willing to kick it up a notch, contact our social media agency to create an effective social media strategy or campaign.