In year-end sales, would you rely on the natural charm of your company and its products, or should you give it a boost, for example, on social media? Whatever the situation, extra Christmas sparkle and pampering of customers never hurt anyone.
You can create visual sparkle by decorating your brick-and-mortar stores, website, social media header photos and other content with glitter, snowflakes or other Christmas-themed items. This will wrap the entire brand in a recognisable and cozy veil, which contributes to a perfect user experience.
However, to engage users and promote sales, potential customers should also be offered interesting content on social media. It encourages users to interact with you: like, comment, share or click on links. In this article, you will find ideas for content creation: what kind of posts to publish during the holidays.
Everything Starts with a Plan
First of all, of course, prepare a plan. The Christmas season lasts longer than other holidays and starts already with Black Friday deals. Try to stay in the picture throughout this period, but also consider your resources: how often can you post, answer comments and questions, how many discounts or gifts can you offer? If you want the posts to be truly interactive, you will have to be ready to comment on them, and communicate with people.
Then select the topics to cover. Ideally, the same topics should run as a single line through all the company’s marketing activities on the website, social media, blog posts and emails. At the same time, consider different segments, so adjust posts in different channels to best speak to the target group.
Once the plan is ready, select the appropriate formats and start executing it. For example, you can in different platforms:
- organize quizzes and surveys;
- ask users questions;
- invite people to tag their friends;
- hide surprises in videos;
- create interactive image and video carousels;
- create an advent calendar;
- prepare photo collages;
- etc.
Let’s take a closer look at these solutions.
Quizzes and Surveys
This is a great opportunity to learn more about your target audience’s habits, preferences, needs and concerns in a fun and engaging way. For example, Instagram Stories offers the possibility to create quizzes. When a user participates in it, they can learn something about themselves or you can give them custom-made recommendations: e.g. “Most of your answers were A, thus, the following style of clothing/makeup/home decoration/etc. is suitable for you.” Add a link to the result leading the clients to a site that offers the fitting products.
Questions that Can Be Answered in the Comments
“What’s your favourite Christmas recipe/hack/trick?” Share your favourites with a short video on Facebook or Instagram Reels, TikTok or YouTube, and ask users to add theirs in the comments. This way, you can offer your target group something interesting, teach them something new, and engage them – two-in-one.
You can also use popular songs, movies, books, etc. as a question. For example, write a well-known line in a post and invite the users to fill in a gap in it. Something like this: “All I want for Christmas is ………..”.
Tag a Friend to Share Christmas magic
During the Christmas season, people often get together with friends and relatives, and think more about their dear ones. You can invite the users to share something beautiful or funny with their friends, too. Post an adorable photo or video, and ask them to tag people they’d like to share it with; or post your favourite product, and ask them to tag people who’d also like it. In addition to engaging followers this also allows you to use the tags as future sales leads.
Videos That Include Surprises
You can also include a kind of wheel of fortune in short videos. Add a number of images, quotes, etc. to the video and make them alternate quickly. Then ask users to pause the video to “find out what’s their …… this Christmas”, and share the result in their comments. Depending on your field, you can choose to show clothes, movie characters, recipes, tech gadgets, etc.
Interactive Image and Video Carousels
Carousel is a good option for both Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn if you’d like to increase engagement and brand awareness. You can use these multi-image or video posts to promote multiple products or services at once. Make the carousel interactive by adding previously mentioned quizzes or questions, inviting users to rank the images-videos based on their preferences or choose their favourites.
Create an Advent Calendar
Everyone likes advent calendars, but creating them requires more resources. Give away a small item/discount each day, something of value for the customers, and promote your calendar daily in all your marketing channels.
To make the experience interactive and engaging, make it playful. For example, hide clues in your photos, post riddles or ask questions. The first person to find the right item, solve a riddle or answer correctly will receive a gift. In addition, you can also give a surprise gift to the person who collects the most points in the advent calendar.
Attractive Photo Collage
For example, on Pinterest you can create holiday mood by preparing an image board of a perfect Christmas table or tree, the best Christmas dishes, gifts, decorations, traditions, etc. Make sure the theme relates to your field, include your own products or services to the collages, and add links to them.
The options for creating engaging content are endless. Put your creativity to work and find the solutions that your target group likes! However, remember that in order to achieve good results and build a strong community, you need to create content on social media regularly and consistently. Single, random holiday posts won’t do the trick, so you need to actively engage users by inviting them to answer questions and share their thoughts, and keep them interested in a specific topic over a longer period of time.If you need help preparing the company’s social media strategy, Christmas or other posts, feel free to contact the Hundred team.