Top 10 Tips To A Perfect Holiday Social Media Strategy In 2023

During holidays, social media surges with engagement. Wondering why? It’s where product discovery, promotions, and purchases unfold. Crafting a solid holiday social media strategy is pivotal in driving businesses toward success.

With 4.8 billion users and increasing time spent on platforms, online promotions are crucial during events like Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas.

Craft a holiday social media strategy to form emotional bonds with audiences. If your brand isn’t on social media yet, now’s the time.

As a WordPress product company, we’ve seen small businesses struggle. A tailored social media strategy can ease their path, organically growing brand presence.

Enhance organic reach through compelling holiday content. As the festive season nears, plan your 2023 holiday material meticulously, underlining the holiday social media strategy.

Let’s plan out something tremendous this year!

Creating a Holiday Social Media Strategy

During the holidays, it’s prime time to plan an effective posting strategy before the new year. This season benefits not only retail but also industries like healthcare and B2B. Be creative with your social media, using timely updates and relevant resources. Your target audiences will love it!

1. The Basic of Holiday Social Media Plan- Learn From Previous Data

Developing a robust social media strategy for the holiday season requires thoughtful planning. Begin by drawing insights from previous data to shape your holiday social media plan. This involves analyzing past performance to understand what worked and what didn’t. Identify the most effective platforms, ROI-driving channels, and content types.

Leverage a social media strategy template to structure your plan. Consider established social media guidelines for consistency. Craft a detailed social media strategy plan outlining goals, platforms, content types, and engagement tactics.

During the holiday period, emphasize a tailored social media strategy marketing approach. Create captivating holiday social media content that resonates with your audience. Ensure all actions align with your strategy.

By utilizing these keywords organically, your social media strategy will evolve into a comprehensive plan that maximizes engagement and resonates with your audience during the festive period.

2. Generate and Promote Holiday-ish Content

If it’s a holiday, you need to show your involvement. And the best thing you can do is to generate content related to the holiday.

But do you know what kind of content works best on social media? Visuals.

Research says we remember 80% of what we see while only 20% of what we read. So you can understand how easier it is to memorize visuals.

Generate holiday-oriented content to let people know you’re also a part of their celebration.

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You can write blog posts around the holiday season, update your old content, create and promote festive creatives, post holiday trivias, etc.

3. Give Away Free Stuff

Customers love this.

Giveaways are something that every customer likes. And if you give away free stuff, you are indirectly increasing the likelihood of more sales in your store. This could be a perfect holiday social media plan if you execute this right.

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Just offer some stuff for free on your store but make sure you ask people to follow you on social media. There are multiple plugins likewise gift cards out there that help you create such giveaways. Using these plugins, you run online contests where you can first ask a user to follow you on social media to get eligible for the giveaway.

At the end of the giveaway, one thing’s sure that you will get more followers. And you can target these followers in future and they’ll be more likely to convert since they’ve already shown their interest in your offerings.

So through giveaways, you reach a broader audience by offering a few products. Well, that’s a great return. Make sure that you include giveaways in your holiday social media plan.

4. Engage with User-Generated Content

Fostering a sense of community and authenticity during the holiday season can significantly elevate your brand’s engagement and reputation. Here’s how you can effectively harness the power of user-generated content:

3. Encourage Sharing: Prompt your customers to share their joyful holiday experiences involving your products by utilizing a unique hashtag. This not only cultivates a personal connection but also amplifies your reach as customers share their experiences with their own networks.
4. Showcase on Your Profile: Feature the user-generated content prominently on your social media profile. This not only validates your products’ value but also demonstrates a strong and engaged community around your brand. It offers social proof, influencing potential customers’ trust and decision-making.
5. Respond and Connect: Engage with the user-generated posts and comments. Respond genuinely to their stories, thank them for sharing, and show appreciation for their loyalty. This interaction fosters a deeper emotional connection, enhancing brand loyalty and turning customers into brand advocates.

By leveraging user-generated content, you tap into the genuine experiences of your customers, transforming your brand’s online presence into an interactive and relatable space. This strategy not only bolsters community building but also establishes your brand as more than just a product, but a part of your customers’ memorable holiday moments.

5. Run a Hashtag Campaign- The Major Part of the Holiday Social Media Plan

Social media campaigns are fun and helpful at the same time. Running a hashtag campaign will make your brand presence unique and help your brand stand out in the crowd. Hence it can be beneficial for your brand to include this tip in your holiday social media plan.

For example, Costa Coffee is running a #CostaFromHome campaign to make sure you’re safe.

Run a hashtag campaign to garner more traffic. But before that, you need to create a plan for this. The first step of your plan could be to identify or create a hashtag that sounds cool, easy to memorize, and is not so common.

Once you find that perfect hashtag, you need to start promoting it on social media. You can employ different channels to promote your hashtag campaign. Don’t just stick to a single channel while promoting your hashtag campaign.

It’s not necessary that you stick to the same channel where you started your campaign from. If you’ve started your campaign on Twitter, you can start promoting it on Instagram or Facebook as well.

6. Offer Exclusive Promotions: Designing Irresistible Holiday Offers

Elevate your holiday social media plan by crafting exclusive promotions that captivate your audience’s attention. Tailor-made for the festive season, these limited-time offers, discounts, or bundled deals hold the power to entice even the most discerning shoppers.

Begin by identifying your most popular products or services and strategizing discounts that truly resonate. Consider “Early Bird” offers to kick-start the holiday fervor. Alternatively, bundle complementary items to create value-packed sets that stand out.

Communicate these promotions through engaging visuals and compelling copy. Highlight the exclusivity and time-sensitive nature of these deals to evoke urgency. Collaborate with influencers or brand ambassadors to amplify reach.

By designing unique, holiday-themed promotions, you not only drive sales but also create a sense of excitement and loyalty among your audience. Your audience will be drawn to these offers, making this festive season a memorable and prosperous one for your brand.

7. Create and Follow a Holiday Calendar

A holiday calendar can be a guide that will lead you to plan better social media marketing campaigns for every important day. Hence, if you create a holiday marketing calendar, you get the upper hand. So it’s vital to create a calendar that you can follow later.

The calendar can contain some of the important holidays which can be most profitable for your business. After creating the calendar and marking the days, you can start creating a social media marketing strategy for each day. Like what holiday marketing activities you’ll do for that day, what segment of users would you target, or what campaigns would you run.

And since you create a plan according to the day, you increase your chances of getting more sales on that day.

But the majority of the brands don’t create and follow a calendar which leaves them with performing random activities in hassle at the end. And randomness cannot bring you desired results. So make sure you have it all planned and structured to ease the further process.

8. Try Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is a method where you collaborate with an influencer that has a bigger following and has the same niche as yours. You partner with that influencer to market your brand/product/service to extend the reach of it.

This is one of the newest marketing tips and it is quite impactful as well.

For influencer marketing, you also need to create a plan to perfectly execute it. At first, you need to determine the goals for what you want to collaborate with an influencer. Goals can be anything from increasing your audience to getting more sales, or anything.

After finalizing your goals, decide what sort of influencer marketing campaign you want to run. There are many different influencer marketing campaigns you can run on social media. Campaigns like a giveaway, some affiliate marketing, guest posting opportunities, etc.

After deciding the type of campaign you want to run, you can start finding influencers. To find influencers, you can use tools like BuzzSumo and Awario.

Influencer marketing generates $6.50 in revenue for each $1 spent, according to the latest poll from influencer marketplace Tomoson. This shows how terrific results influencer marketing can bring. Do include it in the list of your holiday social media plan.

9. Engage With Your Audience

If you interact with your audience, they’ll interact with you. And what’s better than social media for interacting with your audience?

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Add this tip to your holiday social media plan and try to engage your audience through those platforms. You can engage with your audience in different ways on social media.

For example, you can reply to your customer’s queries on social media, or you can reply to the users whenever they tag in any social post. You can also do Live streams which is a great way to engage with your audience.

10. Get And Flex Your Festive Look

Another trivial but effective one.

I’ve already told you if there’s any festival, you need to show your involvement with the audience. And getting the festive look is one thing that can help you do it.

For this, you can give your social handles a festive look like change your cover photo, profile picture, bio, and other things. Do this on all of your social handles and always make sure to promote it heavily.

Promote it on all the social media channels you use to let your audience know you are also celebrating the festival with them.

If you get in the festival look, it adds a personalized touch to your social handles. Moreover, it also leaves a great impression on your followers and makes it easy for them to connect with you more easily.

Things Not to Do in a Holiday Sales Campaign

So we’ve talked about what you can do to create a perfect social marketing plan for holidays. But there are plenty of other things that can ruin your holiday campaign. Which is why you must know about those things too.

Let’s look at them:

A. Being too Salesy

The most annoying thing you should always avoid at all costs. Being way too salesy won’t help you grow your sales at all. Instead, it will work in the opposite way. It can hurt your sales.

You know how annoying it is when you walk into a store and are almost stalked by a salesperson. Personally, I hate it. However, this is the way of being salesy in a brick-and-mortar store. But in online mediums, the approach differs.

You can bombard them with sales SMSs, notifications, and emails (which we’ll discuss in the next point) and it will destroy your hopes of making good revenue.

So make sure to avoid being too salesy and focusing only on selling products. Instead, market your products genuinely and tell them how your products can improve your life.

B. Bombarding your Customers with Sales Messages

Another thing you must avoid in your holiday sales campaign is not bothering customers with sales-related messages. You should always treat them as human beings instead of a revenue source.

You should understand that if a user has just purchased something from you, you shouldn’t just start bombarding them with salesy emails, notifications, SMSs, or any other thing.

This also doesn’t mean you should just forget them after converting them. Obviously, they purchased from your store so chances are they may do it again.

So the best thing you can do is to show some gratitude first. Primarily you can send a thank you mail as soon as they place an order. In that thank you mail, you can include some relevant products and suggest them. If they don’t act, wait for some days (at least a week) and then communicate with them again and keep increasing the waiting time in between your messages.

This won’t look bothersome and they won’t unsubscribe to your newsletter or other messages.

C. Charging for Trivial Services

The holiday season is a period when everyone makes a purchase. And every business hosts sales with heavy discounts to lure people.

The point is, the audience has several options to shop in the holiday season. So, try not to give them any petty reason to leave your store and go somewhere else.

If possible, do not charge them for any small service like shipping, tax, etc. This convinces more users to buy products.

However, if this isn’t possible for you, you can include the shipping price or taxes in the product itself. This will increase the product price but not seeing shipping or taxes can give you a psychological edge.

According to Baymard’s research, extra costs are the biggest reason for cart abandonment which accounts for 49% of abandoned carts.

Now you can guess how critical it is to exclude some of these charges.

D. Ignoring the Customer Support

Holidays boost your eCommerce sales. The more purchases that take place, the more issues occur. When this happens, people come to the brand for support. This is where things can go wrong.

In eCommerce, your job is easy before a purchase. But it gets difficult to post that.

After a customer purchases something, you need to retain him/her. And one of the best methods to keep a customer with you is to provide them with awesome support.

According to a Salesforce study, 89 percent of customers are more likely to make another purchase after having a good experience with customer service.

If a customer is dealing with an issue and comes to you for support, you need to make sure he doesn’t go from pillar to post to get a perfect solution.

If you offer swift customer support with ease, people will prefer your products even if they find some issues with them. Because they know you’ll be there to help them.

Some Influential Social Media Stats

Before we jump on to the holiday social media plans, let’s go through some statistics about social media that you should be familiar with and get the knowledge about how profitable it can be for your business:

• There are more than 4.55 billion social media users across the world. (Kepios)
• More than 73% of marketers believe their social media efforts were somewhat or very effective. (Oberlo)
• 54% of people use social media to research their products. (GlobalWebIndex)
• Over half a billion new users joined social media in the last 12 months. (Hootsuite)
• As of 2021, Facebook is the largest social media platform globally with 2.85 billion monthly active users worldwide. (Backlinko)
• There were more than 6 million active advertisers on Facebook only. (Facebook)
• Facebook stories get 500 million views every day. (TechCrunch)
• Twitter’s more than 4.5 billion U.S. dollars in advertising service revenues, up from 3.2 billion U.S. dollars in the previous year. (Statista)
• 90 percent of Instagram users follow a business. (Instagram)
• 80% of people say Instagram helps them decide whether to buy a product or service. (Facebook)
• LinkedIn accounts for more than 50% of all social media traffic to company websites. (LinkedIn)

What’s your Holiday Sales Plan?

Well! Now that you are aware of some of the most effective ways to craft a perfect holiday social media plan. What are you waiting for? Try those tips and see your sales rising eventually.

However, if you were only scrolling through the post and didn’t read the blog meticulously, here’s the crux.

8 Steps to a Successful Holiday Social Media Strategy:

• Examine your previous data to figure out what you should do this year
• Create holiday-related content and promote them on multiple channels
• Run giveaways or online contests to increase traffic and followers
• Run hashtag campaigns on social media to stand out from the crowd
• Create a holiday marketing calendar beforehand to plan your strategies for each day
• Collaborate with influencers to achieve desired results
• Communicate with users on social media by replying to their queries, providing support
• Give your social handles a festive look by changing their cover image, profile picture, etc.

So those were some tips you must include in your social media marketing plan for holidays to make it infallible. But if you still have some doubts or need help with them, you can always connect with our experts and they’ll guide you through.