A guide to posting social media over Christmas

Don’t do gimmicks

During the festive period it can be easy to succumb to the trend for gimmicky content in the hope of a quick win, but if you’ve spent the rest of the year carefully curating quality content then a gimmick may actually cost you the followers that have learned to trust in you. For example; remember that trend for dancing elves with the superimposed faces of members of your team? Yes, it may raise a few laughs and get likes but is it on brand or provided your audience with any value? No.

#designtip – provide followers with on brand seasonal content that stays in line with your message. A seasonal competition is a great way of getting a bigger reach and engagement without gimmicks.

Tell your brand story authentically

This leads us nicely into telling your brand story authentically. Perhaps you are an online business that is especially busy packaging gifts at this time of year, or perhaps you are a brand agency who spends most of November making seasonal assets for other businesses? Tell that story. Varied content such as ‘behind the scenes’ adds value to your story and helps customers to identify you as real people.

#designtip – don’t have a lot of time for behind the scenes content because you’re busy doing your job? Instagram stories are what I call ‘very forgiving content’ this means they can be a quick unedited snap here and there or a simple video capture of your day.

Build trust in your audience

Christmas is the ideal time to continue to build trust in your audience. Ask customers for feedback and use this to showcase your business to more of your audience. Building trust means building loyalty and when customers trust you, as a brand, they are more likely to return to you time after time. This also means interspersing ‘sales’ based content with ‘digital story’ providing your audience with varied content ensuring your audience doesn’t feel sold to all of the time.

#designtip – although social media is a very useful selling tool it should also be used to tell your business story and with lots of lovely events to attend and festive cheer to spread, Christmas time is the perfect time to tell it.

Shout out other local businesses

While shouting out to other local businesses is a great tactic for other businesses to spread the word about your business it’s also a really nice thing to do. It’s a win win for both parties involved, and there are so many wonderful local businesses that we should be telling our own audiences about. It’s tough out there in the business world and word of mouth is still one of the most powerful ways of getting new leads.

#designtips – why not put together a festive gift guide, tagging the local businesses you love? Or tag that café that provided you with a really glorious hot chocolate? Shouting out to local businesses is also a really good way of building new followers.

Use a scheduler

The key to a rested Christmas break, in my opinion, is to schedule your content. Take a little time to plan your content then use a scheduling app so that content can go out automatically.

Three social media schedulers I would recommend:

1. Meta business /Creator Studio

This app, that can be downloaded on your phone or used on your desktop, was designed to interface perfectly with Facebook and Instagram, and it really does a great job. It’s easy to use and has a very useful planner that shows weekly and monthly calendars where you’ve scheduled in content. You can even schedule Instagram stories from this and it also provides useful analytics about the best times to post. Best of all it’s free!

2. Social bee

This application does it all, so if you also need to schedule content for LinkedIn and TikTok then this is the one to use. Again you are able to clearly see everything you’ve scheduled at a glance and you get handy feedback on the best times to post. You can also respond to comments via this without having to login to the separate channels.

3. Hootsuite

There are different levels to this scheduler, a free option for a certain amount of channels then a paid for section where you can unlock more options. Again the user interface on this scheduler is easy to use, although out of the three this one is better for larger organisations.