The holiday season has become a hyper saturated hot bed for brands to blast endless retail and promotional messaging. From Black Friday to Christmas and everywhere in between - the holiday journey has become transactional and depersonalized.
Additionally, the holiday season has importance to Airbnb as New Year's Eve is the company's biggest night of the year! Giving more weight to this moment and reason to build equity into the season year over year.
Airbnb is a brand that champions human connection no matter what the time of year: building community through authentic experiences. We wanted to bring back the true spirit of the holiday season, by simply asking our community to share and submit photos of how they celebrate traditions, new and old.
Airbnb set off to captivate and engage our global community during this right place/ right time / right frame of mind with a socially-driven cultural campaign that fueled the holidays, the "year end" and "year ahead" travel conversation.
Using Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, we elevated Airbnb holiday traditions. From "AIRBNB TRADITION No. 64: Have the prettiest Christmas Tree in the neighborhood." to "AIRBNB TRADITION No. 37: Breakfast with a view. The pace is slow around here, especially right after a big spread like this." to "AIRBNB TRADITION No. 05: Have a non-traditional New Years Eve."
Then, in real-time over the holidays, we elevated our communities traditions, it in turn this continued to inspire our global audience to create, engage and amplify their traditions. It was a snowball effect that enabled us to keep momentum going well into the New Year.
Over the month of December through the New Year, we were able to amass over 3,000 submissions of holiday traditions from our global community.
We were able to garner over 1.1M likes across the shared traditions, which was 1.2x our target benchmark. Additionally, the share rate of our posted content was 2.72x our target.
