The holidays are a perfect time to reevaluate and take a hard look at your social marketing. As with any other time of the year, having a holiday social media strategy is necessary. People have a more casual approach to social media (in other words, more time to scroll), so this is a perfect time to truly engage, connect, and expand your audience for the following year.
So, how do you give your audience compelling, engaging content while a lot of your staff is on vacation? The checklist below will help take some guesswork and time out of your holiday posting plans. Here’s the process:
- Identify your goal(s)
- Review what worked (and what didn’t)
- Leverage evergreen content
- Examine the least popular content
- Create more great holiday content
Now, let’s go through them one by one and look at what these steps involve.
1. Identify your goal(s)
Any good strategy needs to start with a clear goal (or set of goals) to keep from getting distracted and wasting time. Yes, even though any holiday is a good opportunity to have some fun and change things up a bit, having an end objective in mind is a MUST.
The most common goals we see involve increasing traffic and boosting engagement. What if you could do both, all while reducing the time spent creating new content? The most important thing is to identify your goal(s) and keep them in mind so you can crush those goals!
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2. Review what worked (and what didn’t)
Don’t keep doing things that aren’t working. Why would you create new holiday content without reviewing what worked well and what fell flat in years passed? Spend some time evaluating what worked well before investing resources in new content creation. Here’s how we recommend going about that.
Start with the strongest performers. These are the posts that got a ton of engagement and shares. Shoot for the top 10-25% of posts. If you use a tool like True Anthem, this step will take you minutes to complete. All you have to do is search by your holiday-related tags (don’t have tags? Learn more about metadata best practices here) and look for the posts that have the most engagement. One-click to add these previous posts to your queue and save them for the next step in this checklist.
Just as important is taking the time to look back at the posts that didn’t perform as well. The least engaged clicked, liked, and shared. Grab the bottom 20% of posts from last year or years passed and save these for step 4 in the checklist.
Now that you can see what worked and didn’t, it’s time to use those old posts to boost your engagement and traffic this holiday season!
3. Leverage evergreen content
Take your best content from step 2 above and schedule those into your content calendar. Make sure the posts, articles, and images don’t need any updating for the new year, and get them all scheduled ahead of time.
Keep in mind, you don’t want to edit anything just for the sake of editing. If the post, article, or image is still as relevant today as last year and performed well last year, then schedule it. We call these posts evergreen content, and you can learn more about them here: evergreen social posts.
Your evergreen holiday posts should help fill in a good portion of your holiday social media strategy. Sigh of relief, right? Less work for you when you can pull the tried and true content that will be sure to be popular again.
If you don’t have a ton of evergreen holiday content, then plan to create some this holiday season, knowing that it will be time spent to re-use the identical posts and articles for many years to come.
Did you get your top posts scheduled throughout the coming weeks? Great! Let’s move on to step 4.
4. Examine the least popular content
Back in step 2, we reviewed what did NOT work in years passed and saved those posts. It’s time to review those posts and determine what it was about the content or posts that did not get your audience engaged.
- Was it the image?
- Was the copy confusing?
- Did you use too many emojis?
- Maybe you didn’t use enough emojis?
- Was the topic depressing or not good for the holiday season?
These are a few questions to get you thinking about what these posts have in common and why they may have fallen flat. Let’s move on to step 5.
5. Create more great holiday content
You know what’s worked in the past and what has not worked. Now for the fun part – creating more great holiday content!
Share your findings with your writers or content teams so they can adjust their upcoming content so they can create more content like your best performing posts and less like your least performing posts.
When creating new articles, don’t forget to properly tag your content for easy finding. Create content with not just this year but future years in mind too. A great post or article can be used year after year and save you and your team hours of valuable time during the busiest seasons of the year.
The goal is to automate as much of your holiday social media campaigns as possible while still maintaining top-level editorial oversight. With tools like True Anthem, that process has never been more straightforward.
BONUS TIP: Track your performance and be ready for the next holiday season
Who doesn’t love bonus tips? Here’s ours: track your performance early on, so you don’t have to repeat this checklist next year. Use powerful social media tools to automatically identify your best performing content so you can easily click, schedule, and edit (if you want to) for the next holiday season.
Happy Holidays to you and your team from all of us at True Anthem!
