10 Facebook Marketing Tips for the Holiday Season

10 Facebook Marketing Tips for the Holiday Season KAREN ALBERT

Plan Your Holiday Marketing Before you utilize the power of Facebook, take the time to plan your promos and content.

#1 Create a Content Calendar With Key Dates - Looking to increase holiday sales? Make sure you know the key dates. Note the shopping holidays following Thanksgiving: Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday, as well as Christmas, Chanukah, and other celebrations.

Create a word document or spreadsheet or use a project management tool to keep track of what holidays you want to cover on social media. Remember, you can play off all of the holidays, not just the traditional ones. Look at the special month holiday celebrations.

#2 Emphasize Strong Visual Elements in Your Content - When planning your holiday posts, keep in mind that Facebook is a visual platform. Use videos, animated GIFs, and images to grab attention.

As it gets closer to the end of the year, users’ news feeds will be bombarded with a lot of holiday content. Facebook recommends using motion to grab attention during the holidays. Use visuals to stand out, catch eyes, and stop your readers’ thumbs.

#3 Share Your Brand’s Story - Use the end of the year as a time for your fans to get to know your business and the people behind it. Invite people into your business’s world. Take the opportunity to share a milestone with your audience, do a series of posts showcasing your employees, or success stories. It’s all about storytelling and doing it in a personal way.

#4 Connect Emotionally Through Content - There’s a reason Facebook added reactions (love, laugh, wow, cry, and angry) to the Like button. People want to express their emotions when a story evokes different feelings. Your business content has to compete with posts from your audience’s friends and family.

Engage your audience by creating highly relatable, emotional, human-interest content that will tug at people’s heartstrings, draw them in, evoke sentiment, or make them laugh. You want your audience to see a post and think, “Hey, that’s me, too!”

People check Facebook to see what’s happening in their friends’ lives, so when you create posts or ads, make sure you’re contributing positively to their day and their Facebook experience.

#5 Craft Content for Maximum Shares - The goal of any post is to get a lot of engagement since engagement (especially shares) leads to even more comments, likes, and shares. Be intentional with the content you create.

Ideally, I recommend you craft content that’s worthy of amplifying with paid reach. In other words, whether you choose to put budget into a post or not, each piece of content you publish should pass your “boost-worthy” test. Before publishing, ask yourself these questions:

• Is this post potentially “thumb-stopping” for my audience?

• Does it capture their attention sufficiently to want to stop, read/watch, engage, and/or share the post?

• Is this post in context within the news feed? In other words, while Facebook users’ friends are sharing warm personal stories and fun videos, does this post fit in, yet still stand out?

• Does it offer educational and/or entertaining content?

• Does it meet the needs of your audience and their audience?

With the growing popularity of Facebook’s Live video broadcast feature, now you can easily host virtual events such as a virtual office party or customer appreciation party via Facebook Live. Create a Facebook event on your business page and invite your friends and fans. Facebook recently started rolling out a new feature that allows businesses to hold a live screening of pre-recorded videos that are publicly available on Facebook. Your followers can all watch and comment on the videos at the same time to create a shared viewing experience.

If you plan to host an in-person holiday party, why not invite fans into your world by broadcasting via Facebook Live video? It will give people a taste of offthe-clock fun at your business.

#7 Create Facebook Holiday Offers - Facebook enables you to create an online or in-store offer to share on your business page.

Click Offer in your status bar. Next, choose Online or In Store, and then select an option from the Offer Type list, which can be Percent Off; Amount Off; Buy One, Get One; or Free Stuff.

For an online offer, include the URL. Then enter the details of your deal. Add a title (up to 50 characters), description (up to 500 characters), and up to five photos. You’ll see a preview for desktop or mobile view as you add information.

Facebook offers are an easy way to share special bundles, discounts, and incentives with your audience all year long. However, it’s even more relevant during the holidays.

#8 Cater to Mobile Audiences With Facebook Ads and Posts - Most people are on mobile so be sure your ads, posts, and any related landing pages are optimized for it.

Mobile ads are important for targeting people shopping on the go. However, they’re also valuable for directing people to your brick-and-mortar business. Use the Local Awareness feature to target audiences when they’re near your business. You can even give them directions to your location right on their phones.

Facebook ad units that tend to perform well on mobile include video, slideshow, carousel, and canvas. Make sure the web page your audience lands on after clicking your ad is fast-loading and quick and easy to understand.

Remember, mobile-friendly does not apply only to Facebook ads. Make sure that all of your content is designed for people browsing Facebook on their mobile devices.

#9 Use Engagement Custom Audiences - A strategic type of audience that you can reach with Facebook ads is called engagement custom audiences. These are people who have already shown an interest in you by watching your videos, interacting with one of your other ads, or sharing your website links on Facebook. You can draw engagement custom audiences in further by placing additional paid content in their feeds.

Here are the targeting options currently available for creating engagement custom audiences that you can use for your Facebook holiday ads: Video Views: Create variations of audiences comprised of people who have already viewed one of your videos, whether the video was organic or promoted.

Views are at least: 3 seconds, 10 seconds, 25%, 50%, 75%, and 95%. The longer your video, the less likely people will have watched to the end, so it’s better to select 25%, for example.

Lead Ads: Someone may have looked at your lead ad but didn’t complete the form (enter their email address). Target people who’ve interacted with your lead ad since they’re already familiar with you and have cared enough to click once.

Instagram Business Profile: People who have visited or interacted with your profile or ad on Instagram

Events: People who have interacted with one of your events

Facebook Page: People who have interacted or follow your page

Instant Experiences (improved version of Facebook’s Canvas ads): People who have opened your Instant Experience on Facebook or Instagram. Anyone who has interacted with your Facebook content is likely already familiar with you. Target them further through custom audiences, especially the new engagement variables.

#10 Re-target Your Website Visitors - It can take many touches for a prospective customer to get familiar enough with you to take the next step. People don’t always make a purchase decision on the first visit, so remind them who you are through re-targeting.

Your ad performance and conversion will be much more effective when you use the Facebook pixel and re-target potential customers who already visited your website. In fact, Facebook is now beginning to give priority to ads that are connected to a properly installed Facebook pixel, even including boosted posts.

First, ensure you have the Facebook pixel installed on your website. Go to the Pixels section in Ads Manager and select View Pixel Code from the Actions menu. Copy and paste the code to your website.

Also, use the Facebook Pixel Helper browser extension to double-check that the pixel is correctly installed and firing properly. The icon on your browser should light up.

Now you can go into your Ads Manager and create a variety of website custom audiences based on time on site. The choices are most active users: top 5%, top 10%, and top 25%.

Someone who spends 2 minutes on your site is a hotter prospect than someone who visited for just 10 seconds.

In Conclusion:

The period leading up to the holidays is the largest consumer spending time of the year. People buy gifts for others and themselves. Since they don’t always know what they’re looking for, help them.

Use the holidays as an opportunity to shine a light on your business. When you understand and integrate what Facebook offers in terms of ad tools into your marketing campaign, it can make the difference in having a successful holiday season.

About the author: Karen Liz Albert is the founder of Behind Your Curtain and has 20+ years marketing experience providing impactful social media marketing consulting, training and services to hundreds of business owners, real estate professionals and authors. She is the host of her WomenOnTV.tv show, “Behind Your Curtain” and is a regular guest on some of the top radio & podcast shows for entrepreneurs.

Download her free guide “10 Ways To Boost Your Business Using Social Media”: http://byc.scion-social.com/eguide