Believe it or not, the holidays are fast approaching…gasp!  To help get your business ready, we’ve pulled together tips and best practices to help you get your social media game ready to fa-la-la-la-la your way into the new year.

How to Prepare Your Social Media for the Holidays

Before the chaos of the season hits, you want to get things in order to ensure it’s a smooth sleigh ride from a marketing standpoint.  Here are our tips for success:

1. Update your social profiles – Your social pages should reflect your holiday spirit, so update your banners, profile images, and avatars to reflect the holiday season.  If your business will have holiday hours, add to those to your pages as well.  This is a great opportunity to let your business personality shine through, so have some fun and be creative — let your holiday happiness shine through!
2. Create a holiday social strategy – Define your social and promotional plan now and not when your elves are overloaded and riding a high from too many snowman shaped sugar cookies.  Create a plan that identifies your promotions, when you’ll promote to various channels and emails, and what hashtags you’ll be using.  And while Christmas and Thanksgiving might be the heavy holiday hitters, don’t forget all the other opportunities out there.  Review a holiday calendar and decide with other holidays strategically meld with your company’s personality and your customer base and include them in your holiday social media strategy.
3. Define your support strategy – Even if you offer online chat and social media support throughout the year, you’ll want to amp up your support offerings during the holiday season.  The holiday season is a busy time and consumers don’t want to wait around for answers — a delayed response could cost you a sale.  Make sure you have additional elves on deck to help handle incoming emails, live chat, and social media questions.
4. Prepare your tools – Whatever tools you’re going to be using for emailing, blogging, and social posting test them out and make sure they are ready to go.  Even if you’ve used them throughout the year, make sure they are able to handle higher production and create a backup plan in case something happens and you are unable to access them.  Also, the holiday season brings vacations and sick days, so train more than one person on all tools.

Want to give your elves a little help this holiday season?  Contact SBOS Web Solutions and we’ll wrap-up your holiday social media support perfectly!