Social media marketing should be both consistent and highly adaptive. This means keeping up a steady pace of messages throughout the year and not leaving the account dormant for long – keep changing the content of the communications to let users know that you’re in touch with what’s happening in their lives. If your tweets or Facebook posts look like they were composed by committee five months ago, you’ll have a problem.
‘Tis the season for social media
You can stay relevant on social networks and drum up seasonal interest by leaning into upcoming holidays. As Mobile Marketing Watch recently indicated, this is much better than assuming the mere beginning of the holiday shopping season will lead to customer attention. The last months of the year are full of loud, persistent messaging, making it important for your brand’s voice to hit the right note when calling out to potential and existing customers.
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- Are you ready?: Planning is an important part of the process. Procrastinating is especially harmful during the holiday season because businesses tend to be low on staff members, and no one will have time to come up with good content. You don’t want to miss a big opportunity to reach clients because everyone is busy. Having your messages ready for various points in the season is a great practice.
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- Are you relevant?: There are many chances to reach out and appeal to customers during holiday seasons, but overdoing it or changing key elements of what people like about you can be problematic. It is a mistake to post too many messages or drastically change the way your brand is represented. You’re still you, and your customers have come to trust your brand. Why risk losing all that goodwill just to seem a bit more plugged in? Keep your content relevant to your customers.
Quality of engagement
When it’s time to judge whether your holiday campaigns were a success, what indicators will you look for? Forbes’ Jayson DeMers suggested that traditional measures such as raw follower count or number of times posts have been “liked” are not telling as much as some believe. He recommended social strategies based on content that is relevant and timed well with outside events, and stated these approaches are more important than those that go farming for huge amounts of followers. DeMers recommended seeing what percentage of your audience is actually interacting with your posts. If it’s high, you’ve made an impact. If not, a high follower count may be deceiving.
