Festive Social Media- A Guide to Being Professional During the Holidays

While many marketers and social media managers see ‘happy holidays’ posts as easy fluff to add into their content calendars, they can actually be a lot more useful and have a real impact for your business. Holiday posts can be a great way for your business to get discovered through the use of promotions, events, or company happenings. With the right plan, these posts can be easy to create and have a real effect on your audience and reach, they are also really fun too!

Easy Content to Create

The holidays are all about people getting together to celebrate, dress up, and do things that share their personality and life outside of the office. You can capture these moments and share them with your audience to humanize your business. Your employees are already celebrating and doing awesome stuff. Showcase that on your company page, especially with management positions and the CEO. It shows off company culture and creates intimacy with the employees. This provides relevancy to who they are and who they represent in your company. It humanizes your team and business. 

The actual creation of these posts is super easy with tools like Canva and Pixlr. There are thousands of social media templates themed for the holidays that can be modified to fit your needs and color palette. Creating a Happy Halloween post for example can be as easy as taking one of the fall templates and adding “from (insert business name)” and your company logo. This is an easy way to make a post with minimal effort that is something fun and different from what you may normally post. Be creative with your posts, no one wants to see a picture of a Christmas tree or a pie, do something fun and meaningful instead. 

Holiday Posts Are Timely and Relevant 

Showing that you celebrate holidays keeps you relevant and in front of your audience with posts about things other than just work-related happenings. It can be challenging in the ever-changing world of social media to ensure that you are delivering the right message at the right time, it’s important to recognize the season you’re in and its relevance to your audience. Posting about Christmas in October is a no-go though, save that for November and December.  

Here’s an example; at Codelation we are big supporters of NDSU football and they recently celebrated their homecoming week. While we normally wouldn’t post about sporting events, this was a big deal for our community as well as a few of our employees. We made a simple ‘happy homecoming’ post that went out on Saturday right before the start of the football game to show off some NDSU spirit and get some engagement from Bison fans. 

Keeping social media updated and recognizing current events is a great way to stay active in front of your audience and be engaged with the community that you support. Another thing to take into consideration is holidays or special days within your industry such as national intern day or national coding week for companies like ours. Use opportunities like these to give a little insight into aspects of your business’ world that might usually go unexplored on your social media pages. For example, celebrate and lift up your intern’s awesome work or explain why coding is so cool and integral to the world as we know it. Posts like these give your audience the chance to learn and gain clearer visibility into what your company does. When a business posts or shares about a holiday or special event, it shows they are connected to the world and what’s going on around them. 

Now, you may ask how to do this successfully? How can my business create good posts about the holidays that aren’t just filler content in the calendar? Let’s dive into that. First things first, know your audience. Make something that your target audience will enjoy and bring them happiness (to bring you a share). Create something engaging, relate to your audience with something that they enjoy; show you went to a seasonal event, share your Halloween costumes. Anything that will make your business more human will make for a wholesome and quality post.  The best way to create a holiday post is not to think about yourself as a business, think about what you’d post on your personal pages and lean in that direction. Keep it professional of course. Don’t be afraid to go a little out of brand standards if needed.

Here Are a Few Great Ideas for Holiday Content Creation: 

1. Promote the season of giving 

Show how you as a company give back to your community either through volunteering, donating to charity, or supporting other businesses. Content like this brings positive attention to your business and shows that it’s committed to things that matter outside of itself and is willing to give back to the community. Donating to or volunteering with a local charity is one of the best ways to give back and ring in the holiday season (or any time of year to be exact). These things show that your employees are invested in the community they live in and care about more than just their work and business. These posts also make for great photo opportunities so be sure to take some photos of your employees in action!

2. Show gratitude for family, coworkers, other businesses

Share who you’re thankful for as a company! This can be as easy as a company photo saying “we’re thankful for all of our wonderful employees” to thanking your families and loved ones in a deeper post. Almost every holiday year-round involves giving gratitude in some way, so taking the time to thank the people who support your business as well as your families, friends, and coworkers can really help your followers see that your business is devoted to kindness and a healthy form of support and appreciation. For example, a Thanksgiving post might involve a video compilation of everyone in the office saying who/what they are thankful for, whereas a Valentine’s Day post could uplift a local business that sends out flowers and chocolates. Showing gratitude plays a huge role in humanizing your business as well as helping connect you to your followers on a personal level. 

3. Create a giveaway or host a virtual contest

Give back to your community during the holidays by giving away an item such as company merchandise, a free product or service your company offers, or a gift basket to show your appreciation for your followers. By giving away a product or service, you can turn a casual fan into a customer or superfan simply with a free promotion. These kinds of posts are also highly intractable and attract a lot of attention, shares, and comments. In turn, these can boost your following and raise engagement numbers. If hosting a normal giveaway isn’t your style you can host an online competition for things such as best pumpkin carving, ugliest Christmas sweater, or other holiday-themed things that will get people to comment on the post.

4. Re-theme your whole account

One thing you can do to spice up your pages is retheme your whole social media profile. A few ideas include changing the profile picture colors to something festive, making all the posts themed to the holiday season, or even changing the newsletter heading colors and fonts. This one is more about having fun than actually creating content, yet can have one of the biggest impacts as it will stand out from the crowd of other businesses’ social media content. As long as you’re careful to keep everything up to date and are sure to revert it back to normal once the season has ended, this can be a fun and simple way to celebrate the seasons.

5. Share or create fun holiday-themed lists or stats about your employees

Including your employees is a fun way to show off the unique and amazing faces behind your business, showing off what everyone’s favorite Christmas cookie is, or what people will be dressing up as for Halloween. Featuring your employees is an easy way to generate fun content as well as recognize some of the awesome people that work for your company. Creating a holiday-themed list or poll such as favorite Christmas song, best Halloween costume, or something that followers can easily engage with makes for great content. Everyone has their own traditions and favorite things. Running polls on Twitter posts and Instagram stories can also give you a snapshot of what your followers enjoy and how they celebrate the holidays as well! 

Final Thoughts

All in all, creating fun and engaging holiday content is something every marketer and social media manager should be doing as it makes for easy engagement and adds a fun spice to your social feeds. One note though is to be sure to be inclusive. Not everyone celebrates the same holidays, so be sure to follow your company’s inclusion best practices and talk with whoever is in charge to be sure not to offend anyone and ensure everyone is included. Enjoy the holiday seasons and get your posts out!