6 Tips for a Successful Holiday Season on Social Media

The 2016 holiday marketing season is upon us! Each year it seems that holiday commercials and advertisements start earlier and earlier and they become even more clever than the year prior. So what is your holiday season plan for social media? We have a few tips that, hopefully, will help you succeed during this busy time on social media! This way, you can enjoy the holiday season while still driving in relevant traffic to your business pages. Here are 6 tips to boost engagement, drive traffic and create leads during this festive time:

1. Create a Plan. All great holiday marketing campaigns start with a plan and a clear goal! What is it that you want to achieve this year? Do you have specific metrics that you want to reach? Laying out your plan of who you want to target, how many social campaigns you want to run, how much of your budget do you want to allocate to the campaigns and if you want to still run the regular campaigns during the holiday season, are all preliminary questions you should be working through and answering before you dive in!
2. Develop a Theme. This theme should be consistent with your branding, but can be a little more spirited. A holiday specific theme, a branded theme with a holiday touch, or something in between will work well. Often the issue may be that there are so many great ideas and options, it can be hard to narrow it down to one. Perhaps a blending of a couple of different ideas may work best when creating your holiday campaign theme, but try and still stay on brand and consistent with your company message.
3. Design Graphics and Videos. According to Facebook, 100 million hours of video are watched on Facebook each day. We can confidently say that video will be huge this season to get marketers’ messages across. Whether these videos are short stories, animated videos, or the like – we can definitely see a lot of them being shown on Facebook and Instagram. Take the time to develop your graphics and videos that align with your theme, as high quality and relevant visuals are the ones that stand out on social media.
4. Spread Holiday Cheer. Create and design a simple thank you card, social media post or email blast to your respective clients and followers. This thank you goes a long way and shows appreciation for clients over the past year. It can be as simple as a branded holiday image on social media with a season’s greeting, or a holiday video that your company records.
5. Announce Upcoming Events on Social. Social media is a great platform to announce any of your upcoming holiday specials and discounts, special holiday hours or holiday initiatives to your customers. Turn some of your Facebook or Twitter followers into customers with holiday specials that offer them discounts and a sneak peek at upcoming sales.
6. Advertise. Social media allows you to easily target a specific audience. Targeting your audience will allow you to showcase relevant items and, hopefully, drive sales this season. Social media gives you the opportunity to get your advertising out on another channel, at a cost-effective price.

These 6 tips will help you to succeed with social media this holiday season. Scheduling posts ahead of time will also help to alleviate the stress during this busy time of year. A social media management tool, like Manalto, can help with pre-scheduling your posts out to your target audiences. Have fun creating new spirited posts and experimenting with different types of content this holiday season!