With the holiday season fast approaching, we find ourselves trying to balance the usual workload with attending mid-week Christmas parties, organising staff holidays, office closure times, and also how to keep the business, marketing and social media running while everyone is away.
An easy way to keep an active online presence during your team’s down time is having a social media management tool in place. At Outsource To Us, we believe in the amazing power of digital marketing, but we understand there’s no ‘one size fits all’ when it comes to social media strategies. During the holidays, how active and responsive your brand should be on social media depends on the nature of your business, your brand personality, and what you are trying to achieve.Just Go Offline
Depending on your industry, clients and follower base, and especially if you are in a B2B market, it is perfectly acceptable to just go offline for the end-of-year period. A short and sweet tweet or update informing your clients and followers of your closure times and wishing them happy holidays will suffice, until you are back at work the next year.Schedule and Monitor
Most businesses will find this is the best way for them to keep in touch with their clients during the holidays. While you want to be in touch, you don’t want to be in front of a computer screen for hours every day during your holiday, so we suggest you plan everything in advance.-
Use a Social Media Management Tool
Using a social media management tool like Hootsuite, Everypost, and Buffer – which allow you to access and distribute content to all your social media platforms from one single internet browser tab, and enable you to prepare posts and schedule them well in advance – will help make your holiday season less stressful. Using these tools will help you access comments and messages in one place and will only take you a few minutes. We know you don’t want to be working while with your family and friends, so as long as you check on your pages once a day, you won’t need to worry too much. -
Create a Content Calendar
To make sure you have everything planned and don’t miss an important date, creating a content calendar is a great idea. We suggest you decide on frequency of posts and essential dates before the festive season starts, so you have time to put together quality content that is engaging, and that will help you connect with your followers on an emotional level during this time. Once you’ve gotten all your posts scheduled and ready to go, all you have left to do is check on comments, retweets, and messages, and respond to those accordingly. This is necessary because you don’t want your followers to think the company is ignoring them – as long as your scheduled posts are being published, followers will think you are online, so even if you don’t respond immediately, you still need to acknowledge them.
When You Need To Be Online
If you are an ecommerce business and are still taking orders during the holiday time, or if you have many orders being delivered during this time, you need to be online. Customers are facing stressful times during the festive season, so they are likely to reach out to you with questions and concerns, and they need those answered straight away.-
Create a Holiday Roster
It might be necessary to create a Holiday roster for your staff, so someone is always online and ready to respond – even if you don’t have answers, and won’t be able to get answers until everyone is back in business, you still need to get back to your customers, and be honest. They will appreciate it. -
Hire Someone For The Period
If holiday rostering is not a viable option for your team, you might want to look into hiring someone for that period. It will be more expensive than your usual staff, but it will provide your staff with a peace of mind that the job is getting done, and they can just relax and enjoy their time off.
