Christmas 2022: 12 tips for creating an effective organic social media strategy

Whether your priority this Christmas is TikTok, Pinterest, Instagram or any other platform, adopting these tips will get your social media accounts ready for this year's festive season.

Optimizing your social media profiles this Christmas

Marketing this Christmas should have a complete omnichannel strategy with channel leads working together to ensure consistent brand messaging.

If you have loyal followers, they’ll more than likely be following you on more than one social media platform which is why consistent messaging and visuals are so important.

Time to get in the Christmas spirit by updating your social media profiles to look as festive as possible. Here’s a guide to ensuring all bases are covered this holiday season:

1. Logo and banner refreshes

Consider changing your profile image across all social media platforms to a Christmas version of your branding and update your Facebook & Twitter banner to reflect this too. Ensuring all assets are in line with one another will tie in with consistency of your branding. Where applicable, make sure you have updated your business opening times that adhere to the Christmas period where bank holidays and early closing times often take place.

2. Update links

Ensuring you have optimized your profile during the peak gifting period of the year with the correct links is vital. Using a third-party multiple link sharing tool such as Linktree will allow you to display a range of links to your website that will give the customer an easier purchase journey. Consider which links are the most useful to your customers and feature these in a clear and concise way.

3. Bio update

It is recommended that you check your bio monthly to make sure all of your information is correct and up to date, but you can also ensure it is in keeping with the time of year too. Add in any festive emojis, effective hashtags or information that can help your following to be informed and grow. Evaluate your Instagram bio buttons to include the most important ones to encourage customer shopping or contact.

Be smart about what you include in your bio as on Instagram you only have 150 characters to play with.

4. Christmas posting times

Through organic reporting you should be able to gather insights into the times your audience is most active. Plan your content to go live during these active times to ensure your key demographic sees it and has the ability to engage with it.

You can also take into consideration the times of the day where people are most likely to be in gift shopping mode (during lunch break hours and after work hours).

Top tip: Ensure you are linking to your products as often as possible to make the user journey from scrolling to purchase seamless.

5. Seasonal stories

Get creative with your Instagram and Facebook stories during this time of year.

Utilize the story features such as Quiz, Poll and ‘Ask A Question’ to involve your audience within your organic content and keep them engaged with your brand.

With statistics being recorded that 70% of Gen Zers and 59% of millennials watch stories on Instagram, alongside scrolling the feed, you’ll be sure to capture your audience even more so by uploading stories during the day.

6. Using competitions to build engagement

Competitions during this time of the year are a great way to build up engagement, further reach and new followers. Ensure you have an engaging competition idea with a worthwhile prize that your key demographic would actually want to win. Make the entry metrics easy to follow and encourage your followers to invite their friends to win. Once the competition is closed, send your prize out to the winner and ask for any UGC they can provide once they receive it to feature on your feed.

7. Adapt your Facebook Messenger auto-reply comms

Your brand’s Facebook inbox may get fuller around the festive period with customers asking questions, new enquiries or needing further help with their purchase journey.

Ensure you have adapted your auto reply in the most effective way to help your customers by offering more direct contact details or pointing them to helpful pages on your website.

If you expect there to be offline periods during Christmas and New Year, make this clear on your auto reply to give customers realistic timings of when to expect a response.

8. Include video content in your Christmas social media strategy

Reels receive 22% more engagement than regular Instagram video posts, which is exactly what every social media marketer loves to know when it comes to content, and let’s not get started on the power of TikTok.

Turn your static image gift guides into interactive and engaging reels to give your content that extra sparkle and push. The algorithm on Instagram favors video content, which means your reels will have a better chance of reaching the top of your follower’s feeds and can be found on the Explore page.

TikTok videos and Instagram Reels are a great way to liven up your social media presence. Plus, both apps give you access to effects, music and stickers to go on top of your video content.

9. Encourage UGC content from your followers

Receiving user generated content from your customers is beneficial in so many ways. Not only does it provide imagery for you to use in your feed but it also doubles up as social proof for your potential customers. It gives your customer the power to help establish the trust and reputation of a brand, thus influencing others to follow suit.

Ultimately it builds a sense of community when a customer posts UGC, which is what organic social media is all about.

10. Create holiday-themed content

It seems like an obvious one, but ensuring your content is festively themed whilst entertaining your audience is key. Holiday periods can be the perfect opportunity for brands to get even more creative than usual and we now have a range of tools at our fingertips to create content. Take a look at what people in your industry are doing and how users are responding to it, you can learn what is working and what to avoid through this market research.

Even though gifting is one of the biggest drivers for businesses in November and December, remember to break up your feed with some light-hearted posts so your brand doesn’t come across as fully focused on the ‘sell sell sell’ aspect. Create reels or videos that feature your team dancing to their favourite classic Christmas song or their top tier ranking of the best parts of a Christmas dinner. Injecting personality into your organic content will build trust and engagement with your following which will in the long term encourage them to become a customer.

11. Create social media gift guides

Creating gift guides doesn’t need to be the same old boring format, think of new ways to showcase your products and for different audiences too. The most important tip we can share here is: ensure you have optimized your Shop feed in Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest for easy on platform purchasing. This way you can link your content with your products and allow your followers to instantly embark on their customer journey with you whilst engaged on the platform.

12. Update all on-platform shopping

Across each social media platform you will want to do checks to make sure that the shopping process is as simple as possible for your followers. Check URLs are working and take the user to the correct webpage you are referring to in your posts, ensure the Shopping feed is pulling through correctly with high quality images of the product and most importantly - check that stock levels are maintained.

With these tips your social media will be thriving this Christmas. If you need any support, get in touch with Honcho today.

If you want tips on how to convert your traffic this Q4, learn more about CRO here.

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