How to: Easily Maintain Social Media For Your Business During the Holiday Season

Its the holiday season, which means everyone’s busier than they’d like to be. It’s mid-December, and that means different things for different people. It could be rushing around and buying gifts, getting caught in the crush of last-minute shoppers in the malls. It might look like family and friends taking up all that precious free time in your calendar, booking you in for cocktail evenings or potluck dinners where you’re scrambling to assemble something hopefully not burnt and mostly edible. Most of all, it could be work winding down and preparing for the break; normal days becoming twice as stuffed with meetings as we all try to wrap up the year with perfect creased corners and a neat little bow on top. So yes, you’re busy.

When life gets hectic and we expect it, sure, but we’re never fully prepared — maybe laundry gets pushed back a day or two, and maybe that not-so-critical phone call gets rescheduled twice. These things are fine — in fact, probably expected at this point. However, you know that there are things to prioritize — calling your grandma, rolling out of bed when the alarm goes off too early to walk the dog, and making sure your company’s social media page is up to date.

Luckily, keeping your pages up to date during the holiday season isn’t difficult and when you’re prepared, you may even dare say it’s easy. They say “Good things come in threes” so let’s break it down into three simple steps.

1. Don't be afraid of using curated content

Let’s face it, one of the toughest things about being up to date with social media for your business is consistently generating quality content that captures your audience’s attention, and then holds it long enough to stimulate some form of engagement. Thankfully, the seasonal festivities surrounding the holidays provide a fantastic opportunity to harness timely and relevant content. Whether you’re celebrating Hannukah, Christmas, something else or nothing at all, there’s plenty to share and discuss during this time of year. Even better, someone out there has probably already done it.

This is the perfect time of year to bring creativity into your content and make your business' social media posts festive as you are. That’s time-consuming and requires a lot of energy though, and at the end of the day, we’re trying to minimize the efforts where we can. That’s where curated content comes into play. Sharing links to from other sources adjacent to your business may be the best way to supplement your original content.

Of course, curating content isn’t instinct for most people; that in itself is still a bit of work. However, it can be simplified with a few questions, or even easier, putting yourself in the hot seat. First, ask: Who am I sharing this with? Next, consider: Why will this help them? Follow this question with: Is it from a trustworthy source? And finally, ask: How will the audience react? These simple questions should help you decide whether to share content for external sources. Once you are happy with your answers and believe content is worth sharing, that is when you turn it around and imagine yourself as the audience. Would you be happy seeing this on your feed? If so, share that post!

Keep in mind, however, not to go overboard with the curated content. It’s there to supplement the original content, not replace it entirely.

2. Let someone else take care of it

While the holidays are busy, day-to-day life doesn’t pause  — people are still engaging over social media over the holidays. Take advantage of this by interacting with the audience. This is especially important as over the holidays, people may be asking more questions than usual — a great subject to consider addressing before the questions begin is whether there are extended or shortened business hours to accommodate for the shopping season or statutory holiday. That being said, as the audience engages with social media posts throughout the season, so don’t take the day off and remember to engage in return. Questions asked via social sites demand fast answers, and it’s your job not to leave them hanging.

It’s not always easy to give social media for your business the attention it deserves, especially with so much going on during these busy months. What you may not have even considered though, is that there are services out there to make this task easier by taking some of it off your hands. A great example of this is how TechWyse offers social media management services. Through this service, evergreen content is created to suit your unique needs and published to your website and social media for promotion. This is just one service that can free up some time typically used for content generation to allow more room for engagement with the audience, or other tasks.

3. Create the perfect content calendar and make the most of scheduling tools

So let’s be honest, in our busy lives, all of this seems particularly tough to keep up with. Generating content, posting regularly, and responding to engagement every single day? It’s a lot to have on your plate along with everything else you may have on your plate. We all have that to-do list we swore we made but probably dropped somewhere between the car and the grocery store.

Luckily, there are a handful of tools to make sure you stay on top of things, breaking down our three tasks and spreading them out over time so that we really only have to tackle the timely one: responses. A hugely popular, accessible, and customizable tool is the classic content calendar. Using any of the hundreds of templates available online through a quick Google search, or even creating one unique to your organization can make what first looks like a mountain of work, into a neat and tidy schedule. Taking advantage of a content calendar allows you to prepare content in advance — though timeliness and relevancy are important, it is possible to keep on top of both by looking ahead to things that can be anticipated, like Christmas day, or scheduled work events.

With prepared content, using the built-in scheduling tools on social media websites allows us to complete a full holiday calendar of posts before the holidays even begin. Thinking outside of the holidays, a content calendar can be advantageous for moving forward into the new year. Don’t fall behind on your social media posting or become overwhelmed with the task of generating content and allow your quality to decline as you rush to make that Facebook post on time.

Though these simple tips may come as second nature to some, the holidays come with a rush of distractions that may lead us to forget the most basic of things. Let’s stop that before it happens — slow down and sip our eggnog, open a present or six… Enjoy this holiday season.

For more tips on staying on top of social media for your business this holiday season or to get the help of professionals, call TechWyse today at 866.208.3095 or contact us here.