5 winning Twitter brand campaigns

Twitter is many a PR pro‘s best friend, in part for its lightning speed in breaking news and its way of facilitating quick, off-the-cuff conversations with journalists and other popular social media personalities.

The platform that’s nearly a decade old also is great at driving conversation for brands. Here are five of our favorite Twitter campaigns that garnered great media coverage and social media sharing:

1. Ben and Jerry’s “Fair Tweets” campaign

This campaign wins for its cleverness. By now everyone knows 140 characters is the Twitter limit, so the ice cream makers came up with the premise that “every day, millions of Twitter characters go unused.” The company created a way for people to “donate” their remaining characters to Ben and Jerry’s, which used them to tweet messages about fair trade in honor of Fair Trade Month in October.

What also works about this campaign: It’s an extension of the longstanding Ben & Jerry’s commitment to social causes, and the cleverness saves it from being sanctimonious.

2. LG’s #BestShotEver photo contest