You have most likely heard that social media is an important part to any marketing strategy. It should come as no surprise that utilizing it during holidays can really amp up your sales and engagement. But only if you use it in an effective way. Just like you wouldn't plan a last minute party for hundreds of people, you wouldn't plan a last minute holiday campaign for your social media.

Planning Your Social Media Party

To get the most out of a holiday social media campaign, you should begin your planning early. Our suggestion? Three to six months in advance. This doesn't mean you have to get everything done right then, but you should have your basic concepts and ideas ready. Set a specific timeline, goals, and identify what audience you are wanting to reach.

This gives you time to create (or have someone create) graphics, videos, captions, and more. You should also use this time to decide if you are going to run any special sales or boost any of your posts as ads.

Throwing Your Social Media Party

Depending on the holiday and your industry, you will want to begin your social media campaign one month to a week in advance. Since you already have graphics and captions, now all you need to do is schedule your posts. You can schedule posts directly through Facebook, or you can use a scheduling tool to help you schedule the posts for multiple social networks. This article from Buffer has some great suggestions.

Once you have all your posts scheduled, make sure to keep an eye on your notifications and messages. If someone comments or messages, make sure you reply! One of the goals of your social media campaign should be to boost your engagement with your followers.

After Your Social Media Party

After your campaign is over, there are still a few things you need to do: Check out the analytics from your campaign, evaluate its performance, and decide how successful it was. How do you tell if your campaign was successful? That will depend on your original goals.

If your goal was to gain 50 new followers and you gained 100, that's awesome! You exceeded your campaign goals. Now you need to decide what made your campaign so successful and incorporate that into your future social media strategies.

If your goal was to gain 50 new followers and you only gained 25, that doesn't mean your campaign was a failure. You still gained 25 more followers! That's 25 new people that now know about your business. You're goal now is to decide how you can make your next campaign even better. What was it that held you back? Were your captions too salesy? Did you ask people to like your page specifically? These are just a few things to consider when evaluating your campaign.

Now that you know the basics of using social media to celebrate, take some time to plan your own social media party! You would be surprised at how much interaction celebrating with social media can provide.