Cadbury

In a campaign that may well have Roald Dahl’s family lawyers on the phone, Cadbury has hidden eight golden bars in its products.

The lucky winners can trade the winning wrappers for a solid gold bar worth £18,000.

Cadbury has recently shifted its ad budgets away from traditional channels to focus on social, so this campaign has been heavily promoted across Facebook and Twitter with both free and paid media.

I became aware of it due to a Promoted Tweet and I’ll certainly use it as an excuse to invest in more bars of Dairy Milk.

Doritos

Doritos’ hugely successful campaign involving a Mariachi band playing pop songs continued this month with the Mexican maestros unveiling a video for The Final Countdown.

It followed a public vote held in partnership with supermarket chain Asda. The video was published on YouTube at the beginning of October, but so far has only had 6,000 views. 

This is a disappointing number considering the fact that several of the other videos have attracted more than 1m YouTube views. 

Coke Zero

Coke Zero went back to basics for a promotion earlier this month, dishing out free products to anyone willing to give over some of their personal details.

The giveaway was promoted on Facebook and Twitter using both free and paid media, with more than 1m bottles of Coke Zero up for grabs.

Visa

Earlier this month Visa launched its Golden Space Twitter feed which is dedicated to promoting the brand’s UK campaigns.

To celebrate its existence the feed ran Promoted Tweets to highlight a #winyourfirst competition where entrants stood the chance to win a £10,000 ‘dream experience’.

To take part users had to pay for something using a Visa contactless card, then follow the @VisaGoldenSpace feed and retweet one of the competition tweets.

The feed now has more than 5,000 followers which is an okay number of entries considering the prize on offer. 

M&S Bake Off

Marks & Spencer hosted a social competition this month to make the most of the unfathomable popularity of the Great British Bake Off.

M&S challenged people to post pictures of their own baked goods using the hashtag #MSBakeOff. It received a huge number of entries on Twitter and Facebook, with the best ones being shared through the retailer’s official social channels.

The ultimate winner was rewarded with various Great British Bake Off prizes, which are also available to buy from M&S.

Access All ASOS

#AccessAllASOS is a club that gives members exclusive access to news and events from the fashion retailer. The details are a bit vague, but it’s just enough to pique the interest of loyal customers and encourage them to apply for membership.

ASOS has stopped accepting applications for this year, but customers can still fill in a form to tell the brand why they deserve to be awarded membership in 2014.

It’s a brilliant way of rewarding loyal customers and the exclusivity of it all encouraged a lot of social sharing when the membership packs were sent out earlier this month.

Twitter Q&As

October has been a busy month for Twitter Q&As with Ryanair, British Gas, Gatwick Airport, the Bank of England and QPR manager Harry Redknapp all getting in on the act.

The format is mainly used for PR purposes and as a way for internet trolls to attack well-meaning public figures, but they do occasionally serve some actual benefit.

The Q&A with the Bank of England revealed some interesting information about the country’s fiscal policy, while the British Gas Q&A was a perfect case study for how to fail at social media.

Retweet contests

Alongside the Visa example there were a huge number of Twitter retweet contests this month, including efforts from Nokia and BMW Rugby.

Retweet contests are a quick and simple way of getting loads of exposure and followers, with this tweet from Nokia gaining more than 10,000 shares.