by Stan Johnson

There’s a lot you can learn from a successful brand using Facebook. When you run across a popular brand with tons of likes, you’ll often find that these brands do whatever they canto keep customers engaged.

Using Facebook for business is a careful blend of creativity and niche marketing. When pulled off correctly, it’s a beautiful thing.  One of the best parts about Facebook advertising is that there’s never a lack of inspiration.  Take this time of year for example. With Halloween right around the corner, many brands are creating custom pages just for this season. Below, we’ll look at a few of the top Halloween campaigns out there, past and present.

Top 3 Halloween Facebook Campaigns

1.   Angry Birds

A couple of years ago, Angry Birds came out of nowhere and took the world by storm. To this day, it’s still very popular, and their Halloween campaign is just the latest in a group of good ideas.  This particular campaign isn’t confined to Facebook. You can find the new Angry Birds game all over the net, from their main site to its many social outlets. However, many of AB’s nearly 22-million fans will access this seasonal game directly from Facebook.

Once known as a game strictly for mobile devices, Angry Birds gained a huge head of steam earlier in 2012 when they made their game available to Facebook members. Since then, the Angry Birds page has been constantly providing users with what they want to grow their base. In this 45-level game, pleasantly plump (and spooky) birds crash into pumpkins and pigs and wreak general havoc. It’s technically only an app and not an entire Halloween-based campaign, but (along with a new Star Wars campaign) Angry Birds willingness to switch things up creates a lot of buzz.

2.   Progressive

Last Halloween, one of the hottest campaigns on Facebook (specifically this time) was Progressive Insurance’s “Dress Like Flo” campaign. Flo, the humorous sweetheart who brightens everyone’s day in a slew of Progressive commercials, is one of the most popular personalities of her particular niche. This particular campaign allowed users to download different Flo-specific touches, like the Progressive logo, buttons, Flo’s name tag, etc. It might not be the vampires, werewolves and zombies a lot of Halloween fans look for, but the Dress Like Flo campaign was huge.

Simplistic campaigns like this have inspired many to break out their Facebook ads manager software to help promote similar posts. The most complicated thing in the Progressive campaign was an app that gave simple images to download. It was so simple and successful, it’s just scary.

2.  Mike’s Hard Lemonade

Okay, now we get to the zombies. If you’ve ever wanted to be amongst the walking dead, but without actually having to give up part of yourself as zombie chow, Mike’s Hard Lemonade and its Zombifier app was one of the most successful Halloween campaigns on Facebook in history. By uploading a photo to the app, you could tweak a few buttons and change your mouth, eyes, scars, etc, until the end result left you looking a little worse for the wear.

One of the best parts of this campaign is that your new zombified self would be viewable by everyone to visit the page. You could even be voted on as top zombie.  As you can see from the above campaigns, just having a Halloween theme is sometimes enough to attract a large audience. It might earn more notoriety to create an app like the Zombifier or to create a Halloween game, but simply encouraging people to dress up for the season can sometimes attract a crowd.

How about you, have you seen any spooky Halloween campaigns that you’d like to share with us? Let us know in the comments!