It can be hard to cut through the clutter and make a big splash with social media campaigns. There is more newsfeed competition than ever, which gives added pressure for brands to get truly creative and innovative with social content. But, sometimes, you just never know if your brilliant idea is going to flop or fly. Luckily for these five brands, their fresh approach led to some big social wins.

Here’s a quick overview of my top 5 social media campaigns of 2019, which can inspire social media marketers everywhere as we enter into brainstorming for 2020:

1. Pantone and Adobe Raise Awareness of Climate Change

   Sometimes, great partnerships are the ones you’d least expect. Two totally different brands can come together to mesh their audiences, and in this case, work to inspire change. Pantone’s popular “Color of the Year” in 2019 was announced as Coral – a vibrant shade of orange and pink. But through their partnership with Adobe and The Ocean Agency, they expanded to add that 2024’s color of the year will be “Dead Coral,” illustrating the effect that climate change is having on the coral reefs. It’s grim, but the campaign certainly gets the point across.

   To amplify the campaign’s awareness, the companies have created the “Glowing Design Challenge" which calls for people to create and share their creative ideas and designs with the hashtag #GlowingGone.

2. Explore Georgia

   Getting user-generated content for your brand can sometimes be like pulling teeth! And unless your target audience is selfie-prone millennials or Gen Xers and you have a truly photo-worthy product, the content you do receive is often not “on-brand.” But one thing people of any generation love to take photos of? Their pets.

   Explore Georgia capitalized on this with it’s creative #ExploreGeorgiaPup campaign , currently going strong with more than 5,000 tagged posts on Instagram.

3. Chick-fil-A vs. Popeyes

   This is the type of campaign I love to hate. Something truly so trivial as claiming the “original chicken sandwich” title sparked such an enormous social media stir that we heard about it for weeks. The funny thing is that the original brand tweet wasn’t even that much of a jab, but it’s the Twitter users who truly took the feud to the next level.

   It’s always a delicate decision to publicly call out competitors, especially in a sarcastic and mocking way, but Popeyes jumped at the opportunity. And in fact, their recent tweet shows the dispute is still alive and well.

4. The Dating App Designed to Be Deleted

   If you’re an app, your goal is to NOT get deleted, right? Well, not Hinge. The popular dating app has taken a refreshed approach to online dating by insinuating they’re the app that will help users find their perfect match—therefore making them delete it.

   This was a complete brand overhaul for Hinge, and encompassed print as well as digital media for a truly synergized campaign. The video spots are genius, bringing humor to the often-depreciated world of online dating.

5. Moon Pie’s Plead to NASA

   Saving the best (and tastiest) for last, is Moon Pie’s quest to go to the moon. Their brand voice on Twitter rivals Wendy’s, and their goal to modernize the popular snack has gained mass appeal through their July appeal to NASA via Twitter to send a Moon Pie to the moon in 2024. This campaign just checks all the boxes. It’s clever, cheeky, and nostalgic (is that Windows 95?!). The video has 181k views with an extra-long string of replies. There’s even a Change.org petition .

   NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine replied on Twitter that he’s “all in!” and that gives MoonPie a few years of easy content to work toward achieving their goal. I can’t wait to see what happens. Who else is ready to launch!?

The above 5 campaigns are really just the tip of the moon...err, iceberg of what brands and their partners accomplished in 2019. What were your favorite campaigns this past year? Hit me up at @ZachWelch on Twitter.