Christmas can be an overwhelming time of year. You become bombarded with work projects that need to be finished before you take a few days off to spend with family (and eating way to much). You spenda lot time in shopping malls trying to find those perfect gifts for all your loved ones. And you dedicate significant amounts of time to the kitchen, baking and cooking the perfect meals and snacks to eat while you entertain family and friends. But don't let your Social Media Campaign fall off your radar this season. It can be easy to stay on top of your Social Media accounts, and quite beneficial for your business as well. Read below for some tips to help get you and your business through the Christmas Season. 

1. Start early.  Use social media to create a buzz around your brand leading up to the festive season.
2. Plan ahead.  Create a marketing schedule and include each element of your campaign.  List every task with a deadline and allocate time for printers or web developers.  Include the design and printing of your marketing materials and your time spent on online activity.  Plan back with your delivery or ‘go-live’ date in mind.
3. Create a Christmas brand image.  Change your website and Twitter background to show you’re prepared for the holiday season.  
4. Make sure your website is ready for promotional codes or offers.  There is no point printing flyers with a website discount code if your web developer hasn’t activated the code on your site.
5. Use QR codes. These Codes can be used on your printed, outdoor and in-store publicity, linking people to your website or Social networks for special seasonal offers.

Christmas Facebook Ideas

6. Run a Facebook competition.  Giveaways are a great way to create exposure and a buzz around your product.  Take advantage of this and design your promotion to be shared by users.  Encourage entrants to tweet or post their position to their Facebook profile for extra points or entries.  The more they’re involved, the more others will participate. 
7. Measure your campaign success and statistics. You could use Sendible’s Reporting/Analytic feature which includes direct data from Facebook Insights.
8. Include a themed free gift daily prize draw campaign (for example, the 12 days of Christmas), to encourage your followers to visit the Facebook page and enter every day.

Christmas Twitter Campaign Ideas

9. Come up with your own Twitter hashtag for bringing people together.  For example #MyStoreNameChristmasGifts.  If you have limited time or content retweet news and articles you find interesting in relation to your industry.  You may be a close knit retail community and could re tweet other store’s news. I’m sure they will do the same for you.  This will build up followers ready for when you run future campaigns. 
10. People love to share their Christmas tips and hints. Get people talking about their festive habits, purchases and activities. Start discussions like: What was in your Christmas stocking as a child, what roast do you have on Christmas day, or what's your Christmas morning routine? If you ask a question you're more likely to get a response and start an engagement.
11. Track Mentions. If somebody mentions something you stock then tell them.  Make sure you include a unique hashtag and retweet the tips that anyone posts with this hashtag.
12. Make sure you have a ‘share on Twitter’ tab. Both on your content and product pages, so people can retweet about you.

Christmas YouTube Campaign Ideas
13. Give your followers great hints and tips for getting the best out of Christmas. Film something relevant to your industry.  Christmas food and drinks recipes are great if you’re in leisure and hospitality.  If you’re in retail you could film a “what’s in this season” feature.  For technology a demo of the top wanted gadgets for Christmas.

14. Get people to vote. This could be on the usefulness of your videos by creating online polls.
15. Create fun seasonal video campaigns with hidden offer codes. Let people know there is a discount code hidden somewhere in the video to encourage active viewing and sharing. 
16. Get people to film. This could be their cooking attempts or their Christmas jumpers and link to your YouTube channel.

Following up on your Marketing Campaigns

17. If you’re going to invest time and money into Christmas marketing its worth measuring your ROI.  Track all of your Social Media activity in one place so it's easier to track.

18. Measure the success of your campaign on a weekly basis and compare to your baseline figures. As you measure, adjust your strategy to do more of the things that work and less of the things that don’t.
19. Make sure your business is set up on relevant customer review sites. They are important brand assets, so you should regularly maintain them with up-to-date photos and products, linking back to your main site for more information. 
20. Remember, different demographic groups use different social media platforms. Try different things and adjust for each individual platform – your Twitter followers might be more technically savvy and enjoy posting content, while your Facebook followers might prefer to ask questions. Tailor your campaigns to suit.

Remember, any presence at all is going to be beneficial. Don't let all your work you have done over the year go to waste and embrace the Christmas Season to help you and your business out. And if you don't have the time, there are lots of resources out there to help. Or hey, we here at Interactive Design & Marketing would love to help :)

This month our focus for our online presence will be on conversion. Most of this month is going to focus on discovering and tracking how our Social Tools are working for us. 

Let's refresh our minds on what all we have learned and been working on (you can click on any of the highlighted text, taking you back to the blog about each step to learn more in case you missed it or forgot). We have listened to our audience, built a content foundation, made our content sharable, created a point of view eBook, worked on our content delivery, created Landing Pages, begun email communication, updated our Social Profiles and worked on our Social Integration. Now it is time to convert all this energy and efforts into something a bit more concrete that we can see. And how do we do this? 

Month 10: Conversion
- add Google Analytics to your website or social media
- set up goals for your newsletter and eBooks
- create Visual Funnels or Tracked Links for Google URL campaigns (this can often be done with Google Analytics or Bit.ly)
- personalize your content again to ensure you are reaching your audience properly and effectively
- set up UserTesting to get feedback on your site

Doing all this should help you identify your top 3 traffic conversion channels. Again, trying all these methods, or at least researching them so you find out more, is a great first step. Not all conversion methods are going to work for you or your business, so pick a couple to focus on and use them to help you see how your Social Media methods are working for you.