Tips for a Successful Christmas Social Media Campaign

Christmas is a stressful yet rewarding time of year for any business. Companies need to alter their brand to suit the holiday season, including changes to the design of their website and the creation of a Christmas social media campaign.

A Christmas social media campaign has 3 overall goals:

1. To spread some festive cheer
2. Increase engagement with your content
3. Create a spike in sales

So how can a business achieve these lofty goals using the power of social media alone? At Sites For Business, we’ve compiled a few helpful tips to ensure a successful Christmas social media campaign. But first, we need to look at…

What makes a Christmas social media campaign successful?

Christmas is the season of good-will to all men. This means that the ideal social media campaign for the holidays will build a sense of community between your company and your followers. A successful social media campaign will unite people with common interests and make them want to share the content with their friends.

A successful campaign will promote your business and build brand awareness, all while creating this sense of community. During the holiday season, it’s important to focus on subtlety; you will need to create content that is primarily to get your customers into the holiday spirit, while keeping the advertising of your business in the background. So, let’s take a look at some of our tips for creating successful Christmas content.

1. Holiday Giveaways

Giveaways always perform well on social media. The primary idea behind them is that people like, comment and/or share your post to be entered into competition to win one of your products. People enjoy the idea that they could be a winner, so giveaway posts are great for engagement.

You can opt for one big giveaway or several smaller ones, depending on how much you can afford to give away. Opting for several smaller giveaways, such as gift cards, ensures that you will have several posts with peak customer engagement.

2. User Generated Content

One of the most successful ways to conduct a social media campaign is actually to get your customers to create your content for you! The benefits of UGC are manifold: you’re getting unique content that sets you apart from the competition, and you’re achieving extremely high levels of engagement and exposure for your brand.

One of the most popular ways of doing a Christmas themed UGC campaign is to create a unique branded hashtag. Your social media followers will use the hashtag to submit their user generated content and therefore boost your engagement. UGC focussed campaigns also work to build brand credibility and customer loyalty.

3. Shareable, Festive Posts

Videos and images are the most commonly shared form of content on social media. Creating a high-quality, Christmas-themed video for your brand is one of the best ways to ensure that your content is spread widely across the platform.

The ideal Christmas adverts are either humorous (see this immensely popular Irn Bru advert from 2007) or inspire a sense of nostalgia (like the annual John Lewis adverts). Some video advertising, such as Coca Cola’s famous lorry advert are practically synonymous with Christmas at this point. If you can make something informative and memorable and tap into your customers’ emotions, you’ll inspire them to share your content.

Your advert doesn’t have to be The Good, The Bad and The Ugly; sometimes shorter videos are actually more memorable. If you’re strapped for time, a series of extremely short videos (think the now sadly-deceased, micro-video platform, Vine) can be equally powerful, and provide you with more posts that will inevitably be shared by your customers.

4. 12 Days of Christmas Social Media Campaign

Everyone knows the classic 12 Days of Christmas song, and its potential to be used on social media. However, don’t use the 12 Days of Christmas format as an excuse to just list all of your products. You’ll want to create some inspiring content, such as an animation or a beautifully composed Instagram snap.

If your business provides services rather than products, you can use the 12 Days of Christmas format to break down the different components of your service and demonstrate to your customers just how comprehensive a service you provide.

Furthermore, you can provide ad-exclusive discounts for products and services to encourage people to follow your social media accounts. A discount code for a certain product/service on each day attached to your post is likely to increase both engagement and sales.

As an added challenge, try to stick to the meter of the original song… We dare you!

5. Don’t Be Afraid to Ask for Help

While Christmas social media campaigns can be fun, they can also be very time consuming and aren’t always as easy to implement as they seem. Consider opting for a dedicated social media manager to take the strain off of you and your employees this festive season. Contact us now to find out how we can boost your engagement, credibility and sales this festive season.

Get in touch today for help with your social media campaign!