Have you planned your Christmas social media strategy?
Why you should be planning for Christmas in August!
With the recent heat wave you may think it’s crazy to be talking about Christmas already but the reality is now is a great time to plan your Christmas social media strategy. Christmas is such an important time of year for so many businesses, so it’s vital you prepare to give your customers all the information and details they will need about your products and services. Each social media platform will need a different strategy so we have broken down the main platforms below and how best to plan your content on Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest over the upcoming months.
Instagram and Facebook
When planning your Instagram and Facebook Strategies you need to work backwards from Christmas. For anything that requires shipping, when are the last dates for posting? (If you are in the UK Royal Mail has yet to release these dates for 2022 yet but you can see the dates from 2021 here to give you a rough idea.) If you need to make the products, what is the latest date you could take orders so you can make and ship the products in time? If you are running a workshop what are the dates of the workshop and when would the final sign-up be? If you run a service are you closing over Christmas and New Year?
Once you have these dates established you can then look at when you will need to start promoting your products or services. To create an effective campaign you want to start posting about 6 weeks / to a month before the final deadlines. This way you can slowly introduce your Christmas items/offers and build up the frequency of posts about them within your other content.
When you have established when you are going to start posting you then need to plan out what material you need for your posts. Do you need to photograph your products? Do you need to design Christmas graphics for your services?
Another thing to consider is whether you will create a giveaway or special offer. You will need to have time for people to enter, to select a winner and then time to create the product or deliver the service they have won in time for Christmas.
As Pinterest is a search engine rather than a social media platform it takes time for your pins to get indexed and start showing up on people’s searches. This means you need to start thinking about pinning Christmas products and services in September so that your pins are already indexed for people to find when the peak Christmas searching happens in November / early December.
Before you can create your pins you need to have created the URLs for the pins to go to, there is no point in having a pin that doesn’t take potential customers anywhere when they click on them. So this may mean you need to create Christmas pages on your website now.
A great tip if you don’t have the exact Christmas offers ready is to create a coming soon page for a Christmas shop or Christmas workshop/sale so that you have a URL to use for your pins, just make sure you don’t change the URL when you are ready to open your shop or sign-ups otherwise the links on the pins will break.
If you don’t have images of your products yet or graphics of your services is there anything you could use from last year? Is there stock photography you could use or experiment with text pins? However, the sooner you can use your own imagery the better it will be for the overall customer experience.
If for whatever reason you can’t pin till nearer Christmas remember the great thing about Pinterest is that your pins last forever and will continue to show up in searches the following year. Just make sure those URLs are still active so that wherever your pins send people will work.
How Black Square can help you prepare for Christmas
We hope the above has helped kick-start your Christmas social media strategy and given you the steps to plan out what you will need to effectively market your products or services. Here at Black Square Print Media, there are several ways we can help, do you need graphics or artwork for your Christmas products or services? We offer a range of design services from digitising illustrated artwork to designing for both print and online, find out more by visiting our design page.
Do you need printed material to advertise your products and services alongside your social media campaign? We can print leaflets, flyers and posters. Or maybe you are attending Christmas fairs or exhibitions and need banners, signs and displays. At Black Square, we can help with all your printed marketing material, find out more on our print page.
Alternatively, contact Adam today and find out how we can help your business have the best Christmas yet.