Amplifying your organic holiday social media strategy: A comprehensive guide for the 2023 holiday season

Increased Owned Moderation

By employing an increased owned moderation strategy during the holiday season, brands have a powerful tool to enhance their community, foster brand love, and encourage customers to choose them over competitors. By actively engaging with campaign-related comments on the Facebook platform, you can highlight your brand’s genuine care for the customer experience while directing traffic to product conversion authentically. This helps to foster a sense of community, making sure that members feel heard and valued, differentiating your brand from others.

Embracing this approach can contribute to building a stronger brand image and driving positive outcomes during one of the most impactful times of the year and beyond.

Exemplary Social Customer Service

More than 75% of consumers say customer service is a deciding factor when choosing a brand. Responding to inquiries, concerns, and complaints shows a commitment to exceptional care. Using Messenger or public comments to serve customers allows for personalized interaction and allows a brand to stand above others.

Prioritizing customer service on Facebook provides security for existing customers and differentiates a brand from competitors, potentially attracting new customers.

Shoppable Posts (for B2C)

Using Instagram's shoppable posts and stories, your brand can boost its visibility, interactions, and sales during the festive holiday season. Adding product labels to identify shoppable posts provides your followers with a smooth and enjoyable shopping experience. These posts are great for showcasing seasonal products, promoting exclusive deals, partnering with influencers, and offering demonstrations or style tips.

Brands can also create engaging content through shoppable stories or fun giveaways to increase engagement. You can then use Instagram's data and insights tools to help you better understand your audience and inform your marketing strategies into 2024 and beyond.

Outbound Engagement

A robust outbound engagement strategy will help your brand reach and engage with your target audience. Engaging with similar brands, relevant influencers, or industry accounts may boost your social media reach and help your brand stay top-of-mind to potential customers during the holiday season.

Note: It’s important you choose your engagements wisely, as you don’t want to engage with accounts that may not be receptive to your comments. Creating a “white-list” of potential accounts and/or vetting these accounts before interacting with them will help you engage in a safer way and reduce or eliminate any potential backlash.

Collaborations

Collaborating with brands with similar values and target audiences can benefit both partners in their holiday campaigns. This practice has increased exponentially in the last few years. For example, some of the biggest brands in the world have already announced their collaborations for 2023, including Xbox x Wonka and McDonalds x Crocs. These collaborations are a win-win situation that may expose your brand to new and massive audiences while also offering customers a unique or special experience or product.

Collaboration posts, such as this one between Meta and Rayban, can also be highly successful in increasing visibility between audiences who follow each account while also generating increased campaign-related positive engagement.

AMAs

Using AMAs (Ask Me Anything) to provide transparency and honesty to your audience can allow for positivity to spread during the holiday season. It may also provide a place to alleviate your audience’s doubts or concerns about your brand, business, product, or service. Invest time preparing thoughtful and informative answers, as Redditors appreciate in-depth responses. Be transparent about your identity and affiliations. Redditors value honesty, so be transparent about your identity and affiliations to prevent negative backlash. Bonus points if you bring a representative from your company who can give an “insider” POV of things!

UGC (User Generated Content)

Holidays = UGC feast. Using your audience to create content for you is brilliant on many levels. It makes your job easier regarding content creation while fostering a mutual appreciation between brand and consumer. Being highlighted by a brand is often a point of pride for a user and can be a mutually beneficial way to bolster your holiday campaigns.

For B2C, encourage buyers and customers to share posts with your products, increasing your brand awareness and organic reach. Being authentic and fun will point double on Reddit: Lenovo successfully leveraged the creativity of their community on the platform by creating a contest for fans to submit their best 8-bit art for a satirical campaign that ultimately poked fun at themselves.

Outbound Engagement

Similar to Instagram, respond to users’ TikTok videos with genuine commentary that fits with your brand’s voice and tone. Due to its viral nature, TikTok has an increased possibility of your comment capturing eyeballs and being liked by thousands, further boosting your brand visibility. However, due to this viral nature, it’s even more important that you are very careful with what accounts you engage with, as virality means your comment will not only be seen by the followers of that account but possibly thousands (or hopefully millions!) of non-followers. Make sure you engage with brands with similar values and similar content. Additionally, always check the comment section of their other videos first to see what kind of commentary they receive and the sentiment of this commentary.

Consider Audio

Virality on TikTok is not only reserved for content and comments but also works for audio. Creating TikTok videos and using an original audio snippet that can be used by other users has the potential to make both your video and your audio go viral or become trends. Consider offering perks, discounts, or other benefits to your customers who use the audio for their videos to give it a nudge towards trending.

If creating your own audio seems too daunting, consider using viral sounds for your videos, increasing your chances of going viral. You can get inspiration from brands like McDonald’s using this “WHY EVERYONE IS USING THIS” sound, or the Washington Commanders using this audio from the show Keeping Up with the Kardashians.

TikTok Shop

If you spend some time on TikTok, you've probably already stumbled upon at least one video showcasing a product accompanied by the phrase "TikTok made me buy it." This expression has gained popularity thanks to the platform's remarkable ability to drive sales. With the recent launch of TikTok Shops in the US, the landscape has become even more promising. TikTok Shops offers users and brands the chance to establish their own online store linked to their profiles at no cost, with a 5% commission fee.

Moreover, TikTok allows you to seamlessly connect your products to your videos, providing potential customers with a swift and efficient way to make purchases. Coupled with TikTok's algorithm, this feature enables the development of an entirely organic strategy around your TikTok content and shop. A viral video with a linked product could result in substantial savings on advertising costs while simultaneously reaching both existing followers and new audiences. As if that weren't enticing enough, other users can also link your store/products to their videos, facilitating the creation of a potentially viral affiliate marketing strategy, all at an initial cost of... you guessed it, $0.

Renowned brands such as Pacsun and Wyze are already recognized as early adopters. Still, there remains ample opportunity for any brand to join this trend before social commerce truly takes off.

Social Listening

“Listen before you speak” is wonderful advice for people, but it’s even better for brands. Knowing what people say about your brand and the subsequent sentiment of this conversation is the best way to inform any social strategy you are considering.

For social listening, X (formerly Twitter) is king. X’s advanced search and social listening tools, like Talkwalker, can arm you with the knowledge of everything being said about your brand. You can then take this knowledge and use it when crafting your holiday campaign–or any other campaign.

Outbound Engagement

Like other platforms, an outbound strategy on X is an amazing tool to expand your holiday campaign reach and brand awareness during the holidays. Again, just ensure you vet the accounts you’re engaging with and ensure the right stakeholders approve any outgoing engagements. In contrast to Instagram and TikTok, outbound comments on X can be easily re-shared (or re-tweeted or re-x’ed…), which may massively increase reach.

Employee-Generated Content

Tools like EveryoneSocial are being used by some of the biggest companies in the world to encourage employees to advocate for their employers. Using tools like this to encourage employees to share holiday content on their LinkedIn profiles adds a human touch while using employees as your brand’s most loyal and effective advocates. Having a reward system for your employees in the form of recognition or company merch would also make this a more fun and exciting experience for them.

Thought Leadership Articles

Use meticulously crafted and insightful articles within your niche to provide valuable tips, industry trends, and holiday-related professional advice. This will position your brand as an industry thought leader while showcasing your unique expertise. Make sure to try different formats for these posts, ranging from using the article tool on LinkedIn, sharing plain text as a post, or even reformatting part of your article into more visual graphic or carousel posts.

Holiday-Themed Webinars

Hosting webinars centered around holiday-related topics within your industry brings together experts, facilitating knowledge-sharing and engaging your professional network. By promoting these webinars on LinkedIn, you can augment attendance and significantly increase your brand’s visibility.

As the holiday season nears, employing specific strategies for platforms like Facebook, TikTok, and LinkedIn is crucial for your campaign’s success. These tactics, from community engagement to innovative shopping features, are vital for strengthening your brand’s connection with its audience. By adopting these approaches, your brand is set to efficiently navigate the holiday period, laying the groundwork for a successful new year.

The expertise of the Khoros Strategic Services team can be a game-changer in this context. Our global team is skilled in social media marketing, analytics, and digital care, adept at tailoring strategies that resonate with your audience. Whether developing a new plan or refining existing strategies, we focus on creating meaningful customer connections and driving ROI. As your strategic partner, we bring creativity, analytics, and trend insights to ensure your brand stands out during the festive season and beyond.