With less than 3 weeks to go until the big day, our social media feeds are already filling up with proudly decorated Christmas trees and the switching on of lights as excitement for the big day starts to ramp up. This current of public feeling can be a great time for your business to tap into the Christmas excitement and to connect with your online community.
There are lots of quick and easy ideas for social media content at this time of year that can help make your feeds feel festive without the need for too much planning.
Giving Back
Christmas is the season of giving, so what better time to give something back to your online communities. This can be framed as a reward, a ‘thank you for your support’. A unique code offering a discount or special offer is a popular reward mechanism. This could be wrapped up as a little Christmas series, perhaps playing on the 12 days of Christmas or as a Christmas countdown.
However, a reward doesn’t have to have monetary value. If a discount doesn’t work for your business or service, then there are other ways to make your community feel special. You could ask your fans to vote for a local charity that you could volunteer with or donate to. You could post a team photo and a thank you message. You could simply ensure that your followers are the first to hear an announcement or to access a sale or to help you make a decision – little ways to make them feel heard and appreciated.
Rewarding your community in whatever way you choose is a great way to show that you value their support, to strengthen that bond and to build customer loyalty.
Fan Power
This is also a great time of year to empower your community to advocate your business to others. Word of Mouth remains the most trusted form of advertising, with the last Nielson study on Global Trust in Advertising showing that 83% of people placed their trust in the views of their friends and family, followed by the views of others posted online, even if they were from people outside of their inner circle.
A quick way to do this is to run a competition on your Facebook or Instagram feed. The prize could be a discount, offer or simply a covetable Christmas present. Ask your followers to enter by liking, sharing your post or tagging friends. Make sure that you include terms and conditions and clearly state that your competition is in no way affiliated with Facebook or Instagram. You can read the Instagram competition guidelines here.
Gamify
If you’re struggling for content and motivation, then your audience may also be staring at the clock and counting the days until their Christmas holiday. Offer your followers some festive boredom busters with some Christmas teasers, caption competitions, word searches, puzzles and games. If you can create branded content related to your business with a fun Christmassy twist, then even better.
Nostalgia
Christmas has a special way of knocking down social barriers and bringing people together. Shared nostalgia is high at this time of year and can be a nice way to encourage conversation amongst your community. Asking about their favourite Christmas movie or to guess the song by the line are simple ways to get people talking and connecting.
Make it Personal
This is not something we recommend regularly on social media, but at Christmas is can be nice to show a more personal side to your business. This could be showing the faces behind the profile picture or company logo, meeting the team, perhaps even hearing what their favourite Christmas movie is! Any opportunity to humanise the façade of social media is and always will be a good thing.
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