How to use social media holidays

Social media holidays can be a great addition to your content planning. They can help you come up with new ideas or be a great opportunity to repurpose existing content. You can join a conversation, increase your engagement & reach a new audience.

Plan ahead

Try to plan your content a minimum of 4 weeks ahead, this will stop you being reactive & you won’t feel overwhelmed.

Create a shortlist holidays you may be interested in creating content for. Its really important to make sure you understand what the holiday is about so you can produce the right type of content.

Do some research

Search to see what other people shared the previous year. Did it work well? How much engagement did they get? Have any companies received backlash for something they shared in a previous year? You are looking to find out what worked well & what you should avoid.

When you know the type of content that has been shared previously ask yourself does this conversation fit with my brand? A classic example is companies that have a poor environmental performance sharing content on World Environment Day  people see through this & it doesn’t go down well.

If you have run a campaign on the social media holiday the previous year this is a great opportunity to pause & reflect. What type of content or offers performed well? What didn’t? How did your audience engage with this content?

Brainstorm content ideas

This is the bit we love, it’s time to start coming up with lots of ideas. When brainstorming there are a few things to consider:

• Do you have any content you can repurpose?
• Are you looking to run special offers?
• Are you going to focus on one product or service?
• Who are you targeting? Who is the holiday aimed at?
• What type of content will you need?
• What are your campaign ideas?

The best way to brainstorm is to come up with as many ideas as possible & then edit it down to the ideas you want to use.

Create your content

Write a list of all the content you will need for your website, email marketing, photography, video etc.

Decide what you want the main message for each piece of content to be. Creating all the content at the same time helps keep the message consistent. You can also group content types together to make it more efficient, for example doing all the photography on the same day.

Write and schedule your social media posts

Last but not least it is time to draft and schedule your social media posts.

Conclusion

With a little bit of planning & research social media holidays can really add to your content planning & social media channels.