6 Holiday Marketing Tips From Twitter's Head of Content Planning From live video to social good campaigns, check out these tips to boost your marketing efforts this holiday season.
By Rose Leadem
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
The holidays offer major opportunities in retail, sales and marketing. If you're not leveraging this time to engage consumers and offer awesome content, you're missing out.
Related: How to Develop a Plan of Attack for Your Content-Marketing Strategy
People come to sites such as Twitter to discover things, so these platforms provide a good opportunity to get your brand's name out there. That's doesn't mean promotion, promotion, promotion. Instead, leverage these social networks to offer fun content and live broadcasts. Create love at first sight -- get people to stop scrolling in their feeds. This "stopping power" is what will get you noticed.
Twitter's head of content planning, Stacy Minero, gave us the inside scoop on the best ways to market during the holidays and get people to stop in their tracks when they see your stuff. Take a look at these six tips.
1. Create content as a service.
Take your products and show people how they can use them in other ways.
After Halloween, @SNICKERS showed fans how they could use leftover candy bars in other recipes such as cakes and baked goods. @Lowes provides followers tips and tricks to decorate during the holidays, serving up its products while doing so too.
2. Map your moments.
"Every tweet is a signal of intent," Minero says. As a brand, know what your target audience likes to do, what they tweet about and general information about them in order to cater content to them. Creating content around cultural moments, such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday or Friendsgiving, is especially important.
Related: The Smarter Way to Humanize Your Company's Use of Twitter
3. Give consumers a live look.
Live video has exploded this year. Although that's in part due to better technology, it's also because people are eager for quick hits of inspiration -- especially during the holidays. When brands embrace the idea of being "live broadcasters," they're giving fans an inside look behind the scenes or at an event that they couldn't attend.
4. Go from viewing to doing.
Think of ways to make your ideas more action-oriented. Each time you get consumers involved in your brand story is impactful and will create word-of-mouth buzz over the holiday season.
For the second year in a row, @REI promoted its #OptOutside campaign using Twitter tools, such as conversational video cards, to engage consumers.
5. Employ creators.
Partner with influencers and digital creators to put your brand in the limelight. Social influencers can get your brand's name out there, and digital creators can help create engaging content such as stop-motion videos and GIFs.
If you're unsure where to find the right creator for your brand, Twitter's Niche is a network of creators and influencers that brands can tap into.
6. Always optimize.
Going into your Twitter dashboard or tapping into the social analytics for your brand to what's working and what's not will help you create the right content for your target audience. Dial up on what's working. Over the holidays, this could mean switching up your messaging to apply to topics such as last-minute gift ideas or promotions.
Related Book: Tweet Naked: A Bare-All Social Media Strategy for Boosting Your Brand and Your Business by Scott Levy
Last year, Twitter found that 48 percent of Twitter shoppers got their holiday shopping done in the three weeks leading up to Christmas. Using this information, @Pandora_NA switched its messaging from planning to last-minute gift ideas.
