Do you have a solid social media marketing plan for the holidays?

Are you looking for creative ideas to improve your social media marketing over the holiday season?

This time of the year, most of the retail world is focusing its promotional efforts on Black Friday deals, Cyber Monday mania, and the weekend in between. Social media is perfectly positioned to play a big role in retail’s successes during the holiday rush, from Black Friday through the end of the year.

Promote your best prices and your best product reviews

Every social media platform you use can do two things that will increase sales if you are ready with the right content. These two bits of information can do more than any other marketing messages to increase both customer engagement and conversions.

The great things about these two bits of content are that they can be promoted with short posts and enhanced with an incredible variety of visual images including video.

Testimonials from customers are among the most effective reviews, particularly if they feature a name with a face. Having the customer seeking off-the-cuff in video format is pure gold. You may want to consider a promotion that offers an incentive to customers who participate in a video testimonial campaign.

Retweets and re-posts are actual testimonials that go to a customer’s private network. Encourage these activities and track them with hashtags to understand what is working best.

Get Creative

Exclusive offers

Fortunately, this is just the beginning of the story. Here are five ways to use social media and your content. For example, you may want to create an exclusive price window for all your customers who engage with your brand on each of the different social media platforms.

Sneak Peeks

Build anticipation for a sales event or special promotion by offering sneak peeks in the days leading up to the event. These sneak peeks can be a new one every day or even a sequential set of online experiences that string together to form a complete experience that builds to a crescendo right at the event launch.

Make a list…

… and check it twice. People love lists, especially during the holiday season. Lists give people choices and options, so they aren’t seen as being pushy. With so many blog posts taking the form of “listicles” these days, lists are actually perceived as more informative than ever.

And the winner is…

Contests are an excellent way to use social media and increase customer engagement. Contests create urgency and take advantage of the network effect to increase participation. There are even reasonable ways to make everyone a winner.

You’re in the Driver’s Seat

While driving sales is the short-term objective of any promotion, driving traffic to your website and driving longer-term customer engagement are equally important goals. Be thinking about how to make the next couple of sales easier before you configure a promotion. Successive discounts within prescribed time slots can be triumphs for both you and your customers. Discounts that degrade over time is another way to create urgency.

Get in the spirit

Change the profile pictures and backgrounds on your social media home pages to get into the spirit of the season.

Create exclusivity

Make access to a certain promotion, event or sale contingent on an action taken by the customer. This can be as simple as asking them to “like” a page or post to something more complex like filling out a short form or survey.

Tailored content

Avoid the shotgun blast approach to content delivery. It only takes a little more effort to customize your brand’s message for subsets of your target market and for the types of content users of each platform prefer.

Conclusion

Your social media platforms are powerful tools to create customer engagement and conversions. Mastering these techniques is not something you’ll have to relearn for the holidays year after year. These are techniques you can use effectively all through the year with seasonally appropriate themes and seasonally appropriate content and products.

By using these techniques on a regular basis, you’ll be creating habits and rewards your customer will look forward to. Let this holiday season be the beginning of a new trend of interaction with your brand and your customers that keeps on going after the holidays have ended.