Twitter has been the social network amongst the tech-savvy for years now, and as the platform matures, so do the marketing campaigns undertaken on it.

Harnessing the popularity of Twitter has been a mixed bag for businesses, who have had to straddle the boundary between chummy friendliness and focused marketing messages.

Some companies have struggled to adapt to the particulars and peculiars of Twitter, whilst others have managed to embrace the network and achieve their marketing goals by tailoring their campaigns specifically through the medium.

Here are a handful of those that we think have got the most out of Twitter in interesting ways:

1/ Smart

If you weren’t watching our Twitter feed like you normally do every Wednesday morning, you may have missed us point our followers in the direction of Smart Car’s Argentinian Twitter profile.

In what must have required a great deal of planning and production, hundreds of tweets have been broadcast over two days which have been composed of ASCII images, limited of course by Twitter’s 140-character limit.

Scrolling through the feed acts like a flip-chart, revealing a mini narrative featuring the Smart car driving through a city (PROTIP: tap ‘J’ to smoothly animate the storyboard).

It’s a fine example of some outside-the-box thinking to captivate an audience, whilst still also containing Smart’s promotional material.

2/ Old Spice

Understanding how Twitter relies on influential individuals is a lesson many companies never learn. Old Spice, the viral sensation, sure knows how to spread the word.

Following the success of their ‘I’m on a horse’ campaign, Old Spice’s marketing team targeted key influencers and produced tailored content accordingly.

Mimicking the style of their popular campaign, their ad star Isaiah Mustafa recorded customised commercials about bloggers such as Perez Hilton, in order to convince those individuals to share the video amongst their network. It worked.

3/ Coca Cola

The Argentinians are at it again, with our friends Ogilvy constructing a marketing ploy for beverage giants Coca Cola to align with their sponsorship of the Copa America football tournament.

The Papertweetos campaign centered around the use of Twitter’s famous hashtags, allowing fans to build their own tweets that were later to be printed as confetti.

Over 2 million tweets were penned during the build-up period, which were then printed into individual tickets and brought to the stadium for the Copa America final, which were then unleashed in a storm of fan-driven confetti.

This campaign certainly drove engagement and awareness for Coca Cola, and had a suitably climactic finale too.

4/ KLM

In an effort to draw attention to the Dutch Airline’s new push to move customer service onto Twitter, KLM decided to respond to a select amount of tweets using real people.

By using real people, KLM really did mean using real people. Organising 140 staff under a bird’s eye camera, the painstaking process of using printed sheets of letters in the hands of employees standing in position was used to illustrate the answers to customers’ queries.

We’ve shown how businesses can use social media before, and this engaging and captivating (especially if it’s you that they responded to) way of drawing attention to that is a great way of playing with Twitter in our eyes.

5/ Tweetcamp

OK, you caught us. The sneaky number five in our list is stolen from the Brandwatch archives, from a project we embarked upon last year.

In October 2011, Brandwatch worked with Tweetcamp to generate buzz for their ‘unconference’, an event that needed a community to be built in advance to garner interest in the festivities.

Brandwatch built an app that gathered Twitter data, crawling all mentions of the hashtag #tweetcamp and putting them in this data visualisation.

The data-viz was a virtual campsite, and had numerous gamification and competitive elements, and did much to raise awareness of Tweetcamp. You can read much more about it here.