SOCIAL MEDIA + YOU

Would you say it’s too early to already start talking about Christmas? Well the holiday season began last month for most businesses, so it’s time to get thinking about your holiday marketing efforts on your Social Media sites for 2011.

*I thought this was creepy, but strangely… it fits.

I read a great article today on Blue Glass about how to engage your followers on your Social Media sites during the holiday season. It’s important to keep your audience engaged, especially during the next several months. Here are some of my favorite ideas from their blog:

1. Build a microsite. This site can house a hyper-focused campaign or act as a hub for tying together all of your social and overall marketing efforts during the holidays into one place.
2. Start early. Use your social profiles to build buzz leading up to holidays rather than just focusing on holidays as they are happening.
3. Offer advice on various holiday challenges, like gift-giving, shopping on a budget, entertaining, and traveling. Spread this content across various touch points, such as daily holiday tips on Twitter (using a branded hashtag), stream these tweets into a dedicated Facebook tab, and expand on these tips by creating tutorial videos for YouTube.
4. Highlight your company culture. Share pictures of your company holiday parties, your staff dressing up for Halloween, or your participation in charitable events.
5. Have fans carve your company logo into pumpkins and upload photos to your Facebook page. Feature the best pumpkins in a permanent photo album on your page.
6. It’s simple, but this is a social twist on a common game. Fill a jar with candy, take a picture, tweet it, and ask fans to guess how many pieces of candy are in the jar. Send the jar of candy to whoever gets closest to the correct number.
7. Small businesses can partner with a local food bank and donate a certain amount of food per number of Facebook fans and/or Twitter followers acquired during a set period of time. For example, donate one can of food per new fan the week leading up to Thanksgiving.
8. Sponsor a tweet-a-thon. EpicThanks’ Tweetsgiving 2010is a great example of the power Twitter has to raise charitable money quickly: it raised $11,000 in 48 hours last year.
9. 12 days of Christmas = 12 days of discounts. Offer a different discount or sale item every day to build anticipation and reward fans for consistently visiting your social profiles.
10. Create a tab for an ugly Christmas sweater photo contest on your Facebook page where fans can upload their photos and vote for the ugliest entry. Reward the winner with a gift card to a classy clothing store.
11. Ask fans to share photos of what it looks like outside their window on Christmas morning where they live. This should produce a wide range of photos, like snowy, sunny, rainy, desert, mountains, beach, etc., that can be put in an album celebrating how your fans live around the country/world.

Which ideas were your favorite? Do you have any other great ideas for social media during the holidays?