Deck the halls and decorate your cover or profile photo
Get those sleigh bells jingling on your platforms by ensuring that your profile picture and cover photos have a holiday theme. Your profile and cover photos should be crisp, clear images that represent your brand. Think about investing in some bespoke images created especially to promote your business over the festive period, but if budgets don’t allow, then there are plenty of free festive frames which can be used to add to your existing images; the key is that your followers and visitors need to feel that the account is ‘alive’ to the times, and celebrating the festive season with them, rather than a stale ‘baa-humbug’ page.
According to research[4] the average person has 5 social media accounts and they actively use 3 on a regular basis. To create consistency across your social media profiles (consistency improves the trust and durability of your campaigns) post the same Christmas themed images on all the accounts and continue to build your brand identity.
Set out your Christmas stall and create timed offers
Decide what your holiday offer(s) are and set out your stall early. Having a clear idea and focus of what you can offer potential customers and how this compares to the competition will stand you in good stead. Create a series of images or preferably a short video to promote your offer. 80% of all Internet traffic is based around videos[5], so visual (and in particular, video) content is a necessity, as this type of content is more than 40 times more likely to be shared on social media than any other kind[6]. Create regular posts surrounding your offers and think about boosting your post regularly or creating a series of adverts which can be placed across platforms.
Spread the Christmas cheer
The holiday season is a happy time of year so keep your posts full of festive cheer. This will allow you to join in the glad tidings around the holiday season, projecting positivity and joy through your brand. For example if you are a food related business think about sharing festive recipes (ideally through a video) or why not launch a competition to win a meal for 2 by asking potential customers to post a comment or photo of their family’s favourite festive food? This will enable you to generate discussion, likes and hopefully shares. Globally we have come to know it’s that festive time of year when we see the Starbucks red holiday branded cups start to appear on the high street or the Coca Cola truck rolls onto our TV’s. Whilst you might not have the promotional power of these giants, try and find that trigger that resonates with your potential customers and for your particular brand.
Send customers to a winter wonder-landing page
Whether you are promoting a product, limited offer or competition, it’s important to create specific landing pages to direct your potential customers to in order to create a targeted call to action and add perceived value in the buying cycle. E.g. a 20% off post should link through to the product page on your online site where there is an action to ‘order now’. Similarly a post promoting a competition could lead direct to a landing page which captures the potential customer’s details. Landing pages should replicate any festive branding, which will create a more seamless brand journey.
Wish customers Happy Holidays
Finally don’t forget to wish your customers, potential customers and followers Happy Holidays. They will be logging into their social media platforms to wish their friends and families a happy day, so this is another opportunity to connect with them. Choose a crisp festive image, add your logo and keep your message short and simple.
Start now
There you have it! Our top tips demonstrate that you don’t need a champagne budget to create a strong, cohesive and relevant plan to dazzle your potential customers, so get started today and get ahead ready for the festive season.