How To Prep Your Social Media Christmas Calendar: Tips And Content Ideas

December will be here before we know it and that means that if you haven’t already, then you need to prepare your social media for the festive season.

December is generally the biggest opportunity of the entire year for retail businesses, so you need to take full advantage of this season – otherwise, your competitors definitely will. What are your objectives this festive season? What do you want to achieve? Generate awareness? Boost sales? Promote a special offer or engage your audience?

Take the time to plan your social media strategy by starting with your objectives. Once you know your goals, you can start putting together the rest of your plan so that you can achieve them. It’s always a good idea to change up your social media cover images depending on the time of the year, what offers you have going on or even just to keep things fresh and interesting.

Since it’s December, it’s the perfect time to decorate your profile – namely, your cover image – with relevant festive motifs. Plus, it’s a great opportunity to wish your profile visitors ‘Happy Christmas!’ directly on your cover photo, so that it’s the first thing they see.

But the best use of this space is to promote your December offers, or your best products or services that can be bought as gifts. Or, if you’re using the opportunity to hold a contest, promote it with your cover photo. Use the chance to add powerful calls to action to your cover photo that are in line with the festive season – you can use tools like Canva to put together your design. You can even change them up regularly, depending on what other offers you have going on at the time.

Put together your schedule

You know what you want to achieve so now you can plan out how often you want to publish new content as well as what types of content. This is before you come up with actual ideas; rather, at this stage, you need to decide what types of updates you’re going to publish this December: promotional updates, sales offers, social media contests and any other type of festive-themed content.

Using this list of types of updates, plan out a varied content mix for each day of the week: for example, Mondays you could share one promotional post, a funny Christmas meme and a giveaway – this exercise will help you make sure that not only are you keeping things interesting and varied, but that you’re also posting the right updates to help you achieve your social media December objectives.

Pick the best times: check your social media analytics to see what are the recommended times for posting your updates – this way, you can make sure you’re publishing at the best times for maximum engagement (particularly when it comes to your best offers and discounts!)

Find the right Christmas hashtags: using the right hashtags in your tweets and Instagram updates can make a big difference in reach and engagement. Take the time to research festive hashtags that you can use in your updates – for example, you can use a tool like Hashtagify to research and find the best hashtags.

Make a list of the best ones you find (separated in different categories) so that when you have to post or schedule an update, you can just copy and paste your hashtags. By this stage, you know what your schedule is and have a rough idea of the types of content you’re going to create and publish this month.

Now, it’s worth taking the time to create all – or at least, the majority – of your social media christmas content as it’s going to be very a busy period anyway.

Plus, when you plan your content in advance you can make sure that you’re creating the right content to suit your objectives, rather than coming up with just any content idea at the last moment. Christmas, in particular, is the peak selling season of the year for retailers so it’s the perfect opportunity to give a push to your messaging through advertising.

Monitor, analyse and optimise

As the month goes on, keep a close eye on your social media and social media ads analytics so that you can optimise your strategy as you go along. For example, if you’ve found that certain updates performed very well, then perhaps you can re-use them by making small changes and republishing them.

Or, if you’re noticing that certain updates simply aren’t getting results, then perhaps it’s worth looking into taking a completely different approach.