The best (and worst) social media marketing of 2022
Let's wrap this thing up and forget it, yeah?
It has been a year.
But I don’t want to dwell on all the sad things that have been going on in the world. There’s been a lot to celebrate too! Case in point: I went and got bloody married.
Does 1x Richard Wedding balance out 1x Dead Monarch? I’m not going to say it does or doesn’t, but it’s definitely worth considering.
Also worth considering: all the bloomin’ social media marketing that’s gone on. Christ, it’s relentless. I live for the day we finally get to the end of it. The day that we all post our final posts and then all agree to pack the whole thing in. “We had a good one!” we’ll say to each other. “Remember ‘Bean Dad?” we’ll ask, “what was that all about?”
But for now, we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the posts.
Last year, I did my own end-of-year awards - the 2021 Cookywook Social Media Awards. That was quite fun, and I’ll be doing something similar this year. It’s a mix of ‘best of’s’ across a couple of categories, and “remember this lol?” for a few things you might have forgotten about.
So let’s crack on!
Let’s get my own bits out of the way first.
I was busy this year, doing a record number of podcasts and talks and things.
Here are the highlights:
Crossed off a personal goal by appearing on the Social Minds podcast (by the social heavyweights, Social Chain)
Spoke at the Digital Gaggle conference in Bristol on the “mad science of data-driven creativity”
Chatted with the wonderful Joe, of the Marketing Meetup.
Somehow made a list of the Top 30 Most Influential FinTech Marketers. Still baffled by this, but sure.
Ok, moving swiftly on…
MOST SURREAL CONTENT OF THE YEAR
No, this one doesn’t go to SURREAL (more on them later) but rather to Arena Flowers, an extremely dark horse on Twitter. Here’s a post from January:
I unironically adore this account. I mean, what else are you going to do if you’re a flower delivery company?
Sure, you’ve got your Instagram & Pinterest strategy sorted FOR LIFE (strategy: pictures of flowers). But Twitter, a platform where copy shines? There are only so many times you can post “flowers look and smell great huh” before you’d be driven to madness.
And maybe that’s what’s happened here. Are YOU the Arena Flowers Social Media Manager? Get in touch! I think we could be best friends.
OUT OF HOME THAT WASN’T OUT OF HOME
The trend of ‘posting pictures of billboards that don’t really exist as social-only content’ continued in 2022. It even has a name: Only-Online Out Of Home, or OOOOH (credit: Jamie Shields).
We saw this from brands like Innocent:
I’ll also count the spate of digital billboards we saw during the various political moments of the year in this category. Sure, they technically do physically exist, but they only park outside the place they claim to be at for long enough to take the photo. So it’s barely there.
The winners will have to be serial cereal fiends, SURREAL, for their mix of OOOOH and classic “we did this in MS Paint” tactics.
Can’t wait to see what they do in 2023.
MOST CHAOTIC MARKETING
Chaos was the name of the game in 2022, making this a very crowded category.
It was a year of questionable stunts, like Thursday’s infamous camel:
Animal cruelty aside, the whole post had major yikes vibes.
Or brands taking their social Tone of Voice to whole new extremes:
Desperation aside, some used the power of chaos for good. Shoutout to the Gender Pay Gap Bot that called out brands tweeting about International Women’s Day, despite having a questionable pay gap at their own company:
Many brands simply deleted their tweets when the bot called them out. Bolder brands (*ahem*) took the challenge on, embracing the opportunity to know in advance exactly how and where they’d be called out, and planned accordingly:
But the big CHAOTIC WINNER of 2022 probably remains Duolingo, who finally found the high-water mark of how far they could take things with a questionable collab with Scrub Daddy:
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But chaos comes at a price. Like a wholly misjudged attempt to weigh in on the Heard/Depp trial:
Fair play to Zaria, though, for taking responsibility:
WORST CUSTOMER SUPPORT
This may well be an unfair category. Social customer support is very, very hard. I did it for two years, and it almost destroyed my love for social entirely. Still, some service is so baffling or inexcusable that it deserves special attention. Here are a couple of highlights.
1 - TFL attempted to justify stealing money from lost property.
2 - Argos didn’t get the joke.
But our winner has to be…
3 - Center Parcs threatened to imprison guests in their cabins.
WORST TWEET OF THE YEAR
This one is a no-brainer.
Who is doing the social media for the Home Office? Who takes that gig? What do you say to people when they ask what you do for a living? What do you tell your family?
How do you get the brief to “make a snazzy announcement for our Rwanda deportation policy” and go “yep, this sounds morally sound”. Literally, shame on whoever you are.
BEST TWEET OF THE YEAR
Last year I awarded this to a PLT tweet about some Cathedral City Cheese Bites.
This year, I genuinely tried to find a non-PLT contender. But nothing came close to this:
It’s not even good-looking pasta. It looks absolutely rank, lol. And, as one commenter replied, none of the pictures even feature pasta in bowls (it’s all on plates).
Enjoying this so far? But not a subscriber yet? Substack says I should add a button here to tell you to subscribe:
No pressure, though.
And now, some random other bits.
That’s it for the categories. Let’s just go over some other high-and-low-lights.
Can we make 2023 the year we kill off intern jokes?
It’s sad to see major brands engaging in these jokes. Shoutout to Zaxby’s for calling this behaviour out:
Ryanair continue to Ryanair
From dunking on crypto bros -
-to dunking on, um, Ryanair employees-
-it’s fair to say Ryanair will continue to revel in its notoriety well into the New Year.
Brands got a bit weird when the Queen died.
I’ll spare the full list of examples, but shoutout to friend-of-the-Roast Joe for his compilation of brands losing their goddamn minds:
My personal favourite? Crazy Frog sending his condolences:
Phew! That was a lot, right?
All in all, 2022 was a mixed year for social marketing. Nothing new really came along, and the lives of Social Media Marketers continue to become harder and harder. Instagram hates you posting photos on its platform, Facebook hates you trying to advertise on its platform, and Twitter just hates everyone.
The shining light for me was BeReal. It’s legitimately my favourite social media app because it’s actually authentic and brand-allergic. We’ll probably see some changes to make it brand-friendlier that will, of course, kill it off. But for now, I’m enjoying seeing the usual content grind folks bemoan the fact that it doesn’t fit neatly into the content factory model:
Looking forward to checking back in on this in September!
Thanks for reading. Have a great new year, and see you in 2023!
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