Social media marketing during the holidays is your chance to let loose and delight your customers. Holidays are those brief moments during the year when it’s always the better option to loosen up and have fun with your audience!
Illumine8 will be your guide through the wonderful word of social media during the holidays. Here are some tips to get you started!
- If there’s a time to be cheesy on social media, holiday social media is that time. Have fun, but don’t go overboard. Holiday well wishes paired with a picture of your staff are great ideas, while live tweeting your holiday parties may not be appropriate.
- Holidays are a great time to show the human side of your company! Feature your employees in your posts. Ask them what their favorite holiday traditions are, their favorite seasonal movies, or show off embarrassing childhood photos of Halloween costumes or Christmas morning (with the employee’s permission of course). Take a picture of everyone from your company and share it with your audience. It’s nice to put a face with the person you’re doing business with.
- While your social media presence can involve sales pitches up to the week of the holiday, the holiday itself should be a down time. Don’t push leads too hard during these times. Most people are looking forward to a break from business.
- If you find yourself short on staff, especially during the winter holidays when many people like to take vacations, revisit old content. Link your “Top 10” blog posts of the past year together and schedule them throughout the week. If your office shuts down over the holidays, investigate software such as Buffer or Hootsuite that will let you schedule blog posts in advance.
- Branch out from your usual audience. Spend some of your time on social media posting material for the children or family of your clients. Coloring pages are a great option, or links to blog posts with your employees’ favorite holiday recipes. This is a great option for the day of the holiday itself. You can still drive traffic to your blog with family fun!
- Flavor your media. For Halloween, use a dark, misty filter for your photos. For Christmas, feature lights and snow! Your social posts can be as simple as a “Happy Halloween” on a dark and stormy photo with your company’s logo in the corner. Your messages can still be branded while having some holiday fun.
- While the rest of your year of social media should focus on driving traffic to your website or moving leads through the process of becoming customers, holiday social media should be all about delight. It’s sometimes easy to forget that you need to nurture the relationship you have with existing clients. Social media sites such as Pinterest or Instagram are great outlets (besides your company’s continued great customer service) for warm, fuzzy feelings from existing customers. As an added bonus, potential customers will see how you tend to your existing customers, and may be more likely to revisit your site/social media in the future.
At Illumine8 we love all things social media. The world around us can get pretty hectic at times, so take advantage of the holidays to slow down and appreciate the people around you: your employees, your customers and your family are all a part of who you are as an individual and how that translates into your personality as a company.
Keep an eye out for more social media hints, tips and tricks from Illumine8! If you’d like to talk about how we can help improve your company’s social media presence, contact us! We’d love to help.