#Shareacoke

The Coca-Cola company is already one if not the, biggest brands of soda out there. Pretty much anywhere you go, you can buy the famous fizzy and sweet drink.

Despite their fame, the company still puts a lot of effort into their marketing campaigns. One of the more recent campaigns was the #ShareaCoke campaign. The company branded their cans and bottles with this hashtag, along with one of 250 of the most popular names at the time. The idea was, if you bought a bottle with Steve's name on it, you'd have to share a coke with Steve.

Many people also love things that are personal and special, so this campaign really blew up. Consumer got excited and rushed to the store to find a coke with their friends or their name on it. The hashtag further encouraged people to post it on their social media accounts. With the speed of the internet and the ability for virtually anyone to easily share information on the web, this campaign spread like wildfire. It went viral in the US in the summer of 2014. Every time someone posted a picture with the hashtag, it was essentially free advertising for the Coca-Cola brand.

Furthermore, Coke created the website "Shareacoke.com" where people could create virtual coke bottles with any name they wanted on them and share them on social media. This only propelled the campaign further and took advantage of the ability of the everyday web user to create content.

According to the Wall Street Journal, there was extremely high satisfaction with #Shareacoke and over 125,000 posts made with the hashtag. The hashtag was seen across many social media sites, such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. It still carries on today. Now the bottles have more obscure names, or song lyrics, and some even have removable stickers, so you can keep the memory of your personalized coke forever. People are still sharing cokes and the hashtag to this day.

Image from a #ShareaCoke article

Social media and the internet are a very powerful tool that companies can utilize for marketing. Especially with the "Web 2.0," information can spread even faster, from user to user, as seen in this Coke campaign. The use of social media made this a huge success, and Coke still remains highly relevant today and can contribute even higher sales to this campaign.

Read more about the #Shareacoke campaign and how it has evolved since 2014 by clicking here.