With preparations for the holidays well underway, make sure to lock in your holiday social media marketing plan. Social media has become an integral part of everyone’s lives, so it’s not surprising that it also plays a major role in influencing purchase decisions and brand affinity. Data backs this up, too:

• 63% of the population in America above 12 years old is on Facebook, and 2/3 of the platform’s users visit a local business page a minimum of once a week.
• A survey conducted by Facebook shows that 81% of respondents use Instagram to research products and services.
• 82% of B2Bs use Twitter for organic content marketing. 

Social media is critical for businesses all year round, but more so during the holiday season when customers are hardwired to spend, spend, spend. Make sure you can cut through the clutter with engaging content that drives your relevance this season. 

7 Holiday Social Media Posts that Your Followers Want to See

1. Help Them Out with Holiday How-To’s

The holidays can be a confusing, time-consuming, and labor-intensive season. Make things easier for your audiences with some helpful holiday how-to guides. It’s a great way to subtly advertise your products or services in a way that your target audience will appreciate, even love, you for! From expert homemakers planning to upgrade their celebrations to thrifty spenders searching for simple DIY gift ideas — the possibilities for this type of holiday social media post are endless.

Food and beverage-related businesses can post beginner-friendly holiday recipes that are relevant to their area. For example, gingerbread is the most mentioned holiday cookie in California, while sugar cookies are on top in New York. Fashion brands can do a series on “outfits for every type of holiday party.” Furniture, crafts, and home-related brands can give ideas for how to decorate for the season. 

While reposting and repurposing content may seem like a cost-effective way to go, make sure to consider the best practices per platform. On Instagram, how-to tutorials are the most popular type of video content on the platform. Instagram Stories with central text perform better than ads without text 75% of the time.

For Facebook, 79.9% of the users solely access the platform on mobile, so consider adjusting your content if you’re repurposing a horizontal video or text-heavy photo. On Twitter, the CTR of carousel ads saw an increase of 15% on the website and 24% on the app, so this format might be worth experimenting with for the season.

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2. Make Gifting Easy with Gift Guides and Product Combos

Another way to make holiday shopping easier for your customers is by creating gift guides and holiday packs. This allows you to promote several products at the same time while driving relevance for your brand in potentially niche segments. Small local businesses may also band together to increase their reach by crafting a gift guide or limited edition package that mixes and matches their products. 

Retailers can create a gift guide series contextualizing their products for different target markets — “Gifts for Him,” “Gifts for Her,” “Gifts for Parents,” etc. Local produce and food brands can create a grazing box that includes each of their bestsellers.

3. Make Customers Feel Special with User-Generated Content

Incorporating user-generated content into your holiday social media marketing strategy offers a ton of benefits! It saves you time and resources creating new posts — although, ensure you ask permission or offer compensation (like a gift card or voucher) to the customer. It’s also great evergreen content if the UGC is about a product in your usual roster. 

User-generated content does wonders for your brand credibility and affinity, as consumers are more likely to be influenced by feedback from “real” people versus paid influencers or brand-made content.

According to one survey, 79% of participants feel that UGC affects their purchasing decision — a stark contrast to the 9% who said that influencer content influences their purchase. Furthermore, 72% of consumers said they look for photos and videos from real customers at eCommerce sites, 82% stated that they are more inclined to buy from an online store if the website has visual content from ordinary customers, and 58% leave the eCommerce site without buying if there are no customer reviews and photos. 

4. Run Holiday-Themed Promos, Giveaways, and Contests

The finiteness of the season makes it the perfect time to run time-bound promos, giveaways, and contests. Consumers are constantly on the lookout for a good deal to maximize their budgets. By running short-term promotions, you ignite a sense of urgency while providing customers with more opportunities to take advantage of a bargain.  

Social media gives you a wide range of tools to run and promote short-term initiatives. Instagram and Facebook Stories are perfect for these because they disappear within 24 hours. Plus, mobile-shot Stories outperform studio-produced ads because consumers expect Stories to be more organic, so you don’t have to worry about breaking the bank for every flash sale. 

Brand contests can also be more on the affinity- and relationship-building side, and not necessarily hard-sell all the time. Share holiday-themed quizzes and puzzles, incentivize followers to answer holiday trivia questions, or hold a meme contest. Be creative with your brand contests! For as long as the mechanics are interesting, and the prize is enticing, people are likely to participate and remember you. 

5. Do a Year-End Roundup

From Spotify’s Wrapped to Instagram’s “Best/Top Nine” trend — the holidays are the perfect time to look back and reflect on the year that has passed. Inject nostalgia and sincerity into your feed with a year-end roundup holiday social media post. Showcase your business’s biggest achievements, praise the employees that have stepped up in tough times, and thank your customers for supporting you for the past 12 months. 

Food and beverage-related businesses can post a behind-the-scenes video of how they evolved in the post-pandemic world. Fashion brands can do a carousel post on the best trends of the year. Convenience and mom-and-pop stores can post about their top-selling items of the year. 

6. Engage with Polls and Questions

In a similar vein as contests and promos, use the (free) creative tools on social media to engage with your customers. Starting polls and asking questions is a way to initiate a conversation with your audience, get a sense of what they like and what they don’t, and foster a genuine relationship with them. 

On Facebook, you can post a poll on your feed or Facebook Stories, or create a poll ad on Ads Manager. On Instagram, you can ask questions on Instagram Stories via the Q&A sticker or poll feature. On Twitter, you can create a poll in your tweet. Or, if you want to go old-school, simply post your question as an image and use the caption to ask your followers to comment below. 

Starting a conversation with your audiences shifts the focus from you to them. Make it a fun holiday social media post by asking about their holiday traditions or doing holiday trivia. You can also use it as an opportunity to ask for feedback on certain items or rank top-selling products. Just make sure that you keep things relevant to your brand identity!

7. Strike a Chord with Holiday Giving

In the season of gift-giving, show your consumers how you’ve been giving back to the community. As part of your holiday social media marketing plan, show some love to your favorite charity or social enterprise. Let customers know how you’ve given back to the community because, by association, they have as well. It will make your loyal patrons feel good, knowing that part of what they spent with your business went to a good cause. This may also make them more likely to continue supporting you in the long run.  

Whether you need to upgrade your website and app in anticipation of the holiday rush, create engaging content that tells your brand story, or refine your brand identity — LSM has got you covered! Book a free consultation and let’s talk about how we can help your business grow.