How to Craft an Effective Holiday Social Media Strategy

If you haven’t started to plan your holiday social media strategy, now is the time!

By: Tatiana Cortes

The holiday season is just around the corner! Between Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, and New Year’s Day, this is the most important and busiest time of the year for ecommerce brands.

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Strategy Guide

Here are a few tips on how to craft an effective holiday social media strategy:

Nailing Down a Solid Calendar

Clearly define your social media campaign goals, it’ll help you come up with strategies to achieve those goals. Most common goals are conversions and sales, but you can also incorporate brand awareness, building engagement, or even growing your email list. Once you’ve decided on your goals and the metrics to measure those goals, it’s time to nail down your timeline. Timing is everything when it comes to holiday marketing campaigns, so set a timeline of your launch dates. The most important part of this process is creating a robust promotional calendar that ties back to the specific goals of your campaign. So, let’s say your focus is generating sales, you need to break down how and when each product will be promoted in the upcoming holidays. Most entrepreneurs run 2-3 promotions per week throughout the entire holiday season: IG posts, stories, influencer marketing, and more – That’s a lot of social content to plan for!

Come up with Strategy and Direction

You have your goals and timelines down, you’re ready to choose which social media channels you’re going to light up when you launch your holiday social media campaign – Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, LinkedIn – All should have a slightly different social media approach. The posts you’re creating for Instagram should be very different to what your creating for Twitter. Now you need to set a direction, what will your campaign look like? Brainstorm some ideas such as brand colors, fonts, visual identity, timeline, promotional strategy – all relating to each different holiday.

Create a List of Assets

You’ve overall nailed down strategy, so its time to review the assets you will need for your holiday campaign. Campaign assets are things like photos, videos, graphics, GIFs or anything you’re planning to share on social media. It is very important to get started with this step early on, some businesses start creating their holiday assets as early as August!

Prep your Content Calendar

This is when you put together each piece of the puzzle and it often takes more time than you think. When it comes to planning out your holiday social media campaign content, Later is the perfect tool, an easy to use content calendar. You can schedule your photos & videos to Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest, and view all your social posts on a content calendar together.

A successful social media campaign is based all in the planning – So, you can practically say you’ve started planning for 2020!