Coca-Cola Wiped Its Social Media Accounts, Then Relaunched With a Positive, Happy New Look

If you looked at any of Coca-Cola’s social media accounts over the weekend, you may have noticed … well, nothing. Not that there was nothing new, but there was no content at all. The brand wiped all of the content from its Facebook, Twitter and Instagram—but not for long.

Today, which happens to be World Kindness Day, Coca-Cola is relaunching all of its accounts as part of social media repositioning. The move not only aims to create a more unified voice and point of view for the accounts, but also to put a little bit more optimism out in the world, especially on the internet.

“This is a really great moment in time for us to reset, holistically, our social strategy on the Coke brand handles,” Sarah Traverso, group director, Social Center at Coca-Cola, said. “World Kindness Day feels like such an appropriate day and moment to kick off messages of positivity, but also when you look at Coke and what Coke stands for, Coke really is a brand about optimism, uplift and wants to bring people together in moments of connection.”

The brand is rolling out 99 posts (the maximum amount allowed at once by Instagram before an account is deemed to be spam) on Instagram today with the intention of flooding people’s feeds with happy, positive messages. Followers will also see similar posts flooding Facebook and Twitter. After looking more closely at what kind of content Coca-Cola’s followers engage with and share, the brand found that users share and like uplifting quotes and graphic illustrations. They are done in Coca-Cola’s color scheme of red, black and white to be especially on brand and easily recognizable in crowded social feeds.

While Coke is positioning the move as a social media wipeout, Instagram is the only platform from which it could truly remove all previous posts, archiving them to bring back at a later date. On Facebook and Twitter, the brand simply added some blank posts to each account and swapped out the brand’s avatar with a red and white refresh icon.

While the brand can bring back all of its Instagram posts, you won’t see all of those previous images and videos coming back. Traverso noted that Coca-Cola will only bring back about 50 percent of its previous Instagram posts because they don’t “fit with the strategy of where we are headed,” she said.

“We are super proud of all the work we’ve done to date, but when we took a look back, we felt like we were showing up a bit inconsistently,” she said. “The internet is filled with all kinds of divergent information and everybody could use a little bit of happiness in their life.”

Coca-Cola’s Social Center worked on the relaunch of the social accounts. Created in 2016, the Social Center is the brand’s in-house team that handles social media for 10 of Coke’s largest brands in North America. “We really do everything, from content strategy to creative to content capture, community management, listening and analytics as well as media buying,” Traverso said.

Katie Richards

@ktjrichards

Katie Richards is a staff writer for Adweek.