Social Media Holiday Planning

Last year during the holidays, social media sites like Facebook experienced huge bumps in traffic. People are off work, away from home, and are — sometimes — bored. So they head to social networks. According to Mashable, last year during Christmas, social networking sites saw huge surges in traffic. On Christmas Day 2008, Twitter saw 35 tweets per minute, You Tube saw 600,000 videos tagged “Christmas,” and (according to Google) over 60,000,000 blog posts mentioned Christmas.
So what’s a good social media plan to get in front of all those eyeballs? At Go East, we are looking at the three most obvious places to make your mark this holiday.
Social Media Holiday Plan, 2009
1. Get your hashtags ready and tweet this holiday season. It will be important to get your brand out there by offering holiday specials or expressions of good will. Twitter is great for trending what people will want for Christmas, as well as seeing who is already out there tweeting about their holiday offerings.

2. People will connect on Facebook over the holidays. That’s just a fact. Long-distance family and friends will go there first to find out who did what and who got what over Christmas break. It makes sense for brands to be there. How can brands successfully integrate on FB? Right now, it is up for grabs. A quick search shows 500 Christmas applications on FB, none of which are all that compelling. However, Coca Cola already has over 58,000 fans on its Christmas advert page. That’s a wide open field of opportunities for the next “elf yourself,” and FB is the place for people to have fun with your brand this holiday.

3. Flickr now offers sponsored groups. Some, like Kodak’s “What’s our story?” group, make an obvious photography connection. Others, like the “Western Union Yes!”, start to meld social sharing and cause marketing. Now things are starting to get interesting! Imagine the possibilities for images and brands that visually bring the holidays to life. Asking group members to show how they use a product during the holidays, with the most “favorited” photo winning, is an obvious way to connect with Flickr’s users.


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