The fall and early winter are a treasure trove of holidays.  It seems like we go from one to the next. That’s why it’s incredibly important to make sure you’re using these momentous occasions in your marketing.

Have you ever noticed how retail goes straight from one holiday to the next? One of the reasons for that is because holidays are lucrative for them. People love celebrating. As one holiday’s items go on clearance, the next one is already on the shelves. Never is that more evident than in the fall and early winter where a blur of holidays keeps retailers busy.

Not only is it good for the shelves but it can be good for your social media as well. Even if you’re not a business that caters to holidays or has holiday products and services, you can still get into the holiday vibe through social media. Holidays are a common thing for people to talk about and you can get quite a bit of interaction and exchange with holiday posts. The content during these times practically writes itself. Here are a few ways you can make the most of holiday content.

Why Your Aim Should Be Engagement

Your aim for social media posts should always be engagement. Search engines and social media platforms spend a lot of time looking at how your audience interacts with you.

If you are simply shouting into the wind with no interaction, they won’t see you as very valuable to the people who follow you. However, if they see evidence of you interacting and your audience spending time with you, they will think you are important to them and show more of your content in their streams and as part of search results.

If your audience is interacting with you, Facebook doesn’t differentiate between  good or bad. You just want to get them talking. That doesn’t mean you should do anything that is going to mar your reputation but it does mean that you can feel free to bring up certain topics that you know people have strong opinions about such as the deliciousness of (or overrating of) pumpkin spice.

Social Media Post Ideas for the Holidays

Use these post ideas to drive your audience to engage with you. Remember every post should be inspirational, educational, or entertaining. Don’t feel pressured to make every post about your business. But you can feel free to tie it in at times in serious and humorous ways.

1. Share your Halloween costume or your pets or your child’s. Host a Halloween costume contest on social media and allow people to vote for their favorites.
2. Ask them what their favorite Halloween candy is.
3. Ask your audience what’s the worst Halloween candy to get when trick-or-treating.
4. If your business is mainly local, post local holiday event schedules. People always want to know when the holiday parade starts.
5. Ask what their favorite pie is.
6. Run a poll to find out what percentage of your viewing audience eats something other than turkey as a main course for Thanksgiving dinner.
7. Ask your audience what the hottest toy or gift is this year for kids.
8. Encourage people to share something they’re thankful for.
9. Ask people to share their favorite side for Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner.
10. Share funny recollections of Halloween as a child.
11. Post image quotes from your favorite holiday movies.
12. Ask people what their favorite Christmas movie is.
13. Ask your audience whether they consider Die Hard a Christmas movie.
14. Create a list of horror movies and ask your audience how many of them they’ve seen.
15. Post a movie quote and ask them what movie it’s from.
16. No matter what service or product you sell from September 1st through December 1st add the words “pumpkin spice” to it.
17. Post a beautiful picture of the holidays in your town.
18. Decorate your place of business for the holidays and share it with your audience.  Encourage them to share theirs as well.
19. Recreate The 12 Days of Christmas using things from your business. You can do this with any Christmas carols.
20. Ask people to share their holiday traditions with you. Encourage them to share what they love most about this time of year.
21. Create a holiday or seasonal geofilter on Snapchat or Facebook.
22. Run a giveaway. Who doesn’t love a freebie especially around the holiday? Think of the gift-giving possibilities.
23. Keep a running list of the worst gifts ever given. Encourage your audience to add to it.  You can even create a blog post out of it.
24. Elf Yourself.
25. Make a video of you and or your staff celebrating any one of the holidays in Q4.
26. Volunteer and create a video or live stream your work to help a nonprofit get more attention for their cause at the end of the year when so many people are looking for ways to donate time or money.
27. Share a simple DIY craft or hack for this time of year.
28. Surprise someone with a treat.
29. Host a Halloween costume party or trick or treat in your store or place of business.
30. Create a roundup of things you hope to leave in past or things you hope to gain in the new year.

Remember, when you’re at a lack of ideas for posts there are universal topics that most people find humorous or can identify with. These include coffee, not having enough time, being tired, not knowing how to work electronics, and kids misbehaving. Even if your audience members don’t have first-hand knowledge of these things, you know they know someone who resembles the post, and can laugh along.

Don’t sit on the sidelines this year. Make sure you get into the holiday spirit if nowhere else other than social media. Holiday and festive posts offer the perfect image-laden opportunities to connect with your audience. You needn’t worry that all of the posts are specifically about your business. Your aim should be engagement and interaction. If that’s asking whether your audience likes pumpkin pie or not, that’s perfectly fine.

Christina R. Green teaches small businesses, chambers, and associations how to connect through content. Her articles have appeared in the Midwest Society of Association Executives’ Magazine, NTEN.org, AssociationTech, Event Managers Blog, and WritersWeekly. She is a regular blogger at Frankjkenny.com.  As an introverted writer, she’s on a quest to bring great storytelling to organizations everywhere while single-handedly combatting the overuse of exclamation points.

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