How To Give Your Social Media Strategy A Holiday Boost With Content

Be Content Savvy 

Seasonal messaging themes and promotions attract a lot of attention on social media. This should come as no surprise, since social media marketing has had a strong personal flavor from the beginning. If you want to use the holidays to engage new contacts and strengthen relationships with your current community, here are a few ideas for leveraging content to stand out from the crowd.

Plan Ahead

At the time of this writing, a few days before Thanksgiving, it is obviously too late to be strategizing for Thanksgiving 2014 -- but it’s also too late for Christmas 2014 or New Year’s 2015.

Try to plan at least a quarter ahead. Now is a good time to be working on plans for the Super Bowl, Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, etc. You need time to create content and/or put all of your content pieces in place.

The Content

One of the best ways to attract attention on social media is to share your holiday-themed content. But for this to work, your content has to be outstanding, and you have to find publishers with vibrant social communities of their own. This takes time.

The first step in content creation is coming up with a holiday-themed topic that’s highly useful to your social communities. If your content has a holiday hook but no substance, it may garner a few clicks -- but that will be the end of it. In contrast, content with substance garners organic shares and clickthroughs to your site.  

Think multimedia, too. A terrific holiday blog post is excellent, but a terrific holiday infographic or slide presentation may be even better. For starters, the visual Web is gaining popularity by leaps and bounds, probably because of the surge in mobile Internet usage. In addition, you face less competition with a multimedia offering, as most social media marketers are focused exclusively on blog posts.

The Pitch

In terms of pitching content to off-site publishers, the good news is that publishers by and large love anything with a holiday theme. However, they are also inundated with holiday-themed content, so pitching early gives you a big advantage. As a publisher, I love having my calendar locked down three months in advance -- one less thing to worry about or scramble to do. Obviously, pitching early requires advance planning; wait until the last minute and you’re just like everybody else, and the only thing you’ll lock down is mediocre results.

Pitching and publishing can be a multi-pronged strategy as well. For example, an infographic can be published on your site or blog, and then pitched to as many publishers in your niche as you want. You could further promote the infographic with a press release (if the content merits it) and/or an email blast to your house list.

One off-site piece of content can be shared on social media only so many times. These multiple content-related activities produce numerous opportunities to promote your content through social media without being overly repetitious or boring.

How to Get Started

If you want to sharpen your holiday social media strategy, a great first step is getting your team together now to brainstorm ideas for Valentine’s Day content. The creative process is impossible to predict; you may come up with a killer idea in 10 minutes, or wrestle with options for several weeks.

Once you have a workable idea, refine it by asking questions such as:

·         What would make this really useful and different?

·         Does the holiday theme tightly relate to the content, or will it be perceived as merely a gimmick?

·         What is/are the best way(s) to create the content -- blog post, infographic, etc.

When these questions are answered to your satisfaction, you can begin assigning work, creating the content and developing tactics for publication and social media distribution.

If you wind up finishing all of this with a month to spare, you’ll appreciate the extra time and have no trouble finding a way to fill it … perhaps by treating yourself to an extra holiday.

Brad Shorr is the B2B Marketing Director of Straight North LLC, a search engine optimization firm headquartered near Chicago. Brad writes frequently on content marketing and social media.