Scare off your organization’s social media naysayers with these Halloween social marketing tricks to drive measurable results!
Skip the Halloween treats because, while tasty, the sugar high doesn’t grow anything but your waistline.
Instead use these 31 Halloween social media marketing tips to improve your business results while avoiding the witches, ghosts, vampires and zombies that may lead you astray.
31 Halloween Social Media Marketing Tips
Like any experienced Halloween trick-or-treater, map out your best options to get the best haul.
Focus on getting the best quality candy and treats, instead a lot of sweets you don’t want or like!
For social media marketers, this translates to measurable business results in terms that your CEO and CFO understand.
1. Document your social media marketing goals and strategy
To drive measurable business results from your social media marketing, start with SMART goals (Translation: Specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound) such as:
- Increase brand awareness
- Grow audience
- Engage with community, audience and customers
- Drive website traffic
- Generate leads and revenue
Research conducted by Dr. Gail Matthew of Dominican University reveals that results improve significantly when goals are not only documented but also shared.
Research proves that to achieve success your goals must documented and shared
Therefore, it’s crucial to document and distribute your social media marketing strategy and goals across your organization.
Actionable Halloween Social Media Marketing Tips:
- Don’t let the headless horseman gallop off with your social media. Integrate your documented social media marketing strategy into your overall marketing plan.
- Keep your employees and followers safe from vampires who may feed on their innocence. Offer employees clear social media guidelines so they know what they can say when they represent your firm in contrast to their personal profiles. Also, provide guidance for visitors and followers.
- Be prepared for holiday bonfires that get out of control. To avoid hard-to-handle social media PR flare-ups, develop a crisis management plan and keep it up-to-date.
2. Establish your social media presence
Don’t be a social media ghost! It spooks potential visitors.
Instead complete and update your social media profiles.
Then optimize your profile based on each social media platform guidelines. Provide complete and up-to-date information about your company.
Where possible push the boundaries without breaking the platform’s guidelines. For example, check out how Twitter expert Madalyn Sklar maximizes the platform’s profile.
How To Take Full Advantage of Your Twitter Profile – Example: Madalyn Sklar
Actionable Halloween Social Media Marketing Tips:
- Dress your social media avatars to show your Halloween spirit. Keep your company avatar aligned with your brand when making holiday changes.
- Decorate your social media presence by cross-promoting your other social media and owned presence. Add links to your social media profiles to help prospects find you elsewhere on social media.
- Skip the social media vanishing act by only showing up when the spirit moves you. Consistency matters.
- Offer a treasure map in the form of your website, email contact, physical address and phone number on your social media profiles to make your business findable.
3. Know Your Audience
Make sure that your social media followers aren’t just spooks and ghosts!
Why?
Because your social media marketing success depends on developing relationships with real people. Over time, they become a community.
Need help?
Try Sparktoro’s SparkScore, a new tool that lets you measure the true influence of your Twitter followers as well as the proportion of fake follwers. (BTW, did I tell you that it’s free?) Even better, it provides a roadmap to help you improve the engagement and power of your account.
Actionable Halloween Social Media Marketing Tips:
- Get to know the real people behind their social media costumes. To learn what drives your followers engage with and survey them. Find out which social media networks they frequent, what their posting schedule is, what type of content they want, and what type of voice they seek.
4. Be Human
Social media underscores The Cluetrain Manifesto’s revelation that the web consists of people talking in human voices. Specifically, it states:
“Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.” —The Cluetrain Manifesto
For example, examine how Facebook expert Amy Porterfield talks to her audience:
Check out how Facebook expert Amy Porterfield uses her image to support her business
Actionable Halloween Social Media Marketing Tips:
- Keep werewolves from eating the heart of your social media. Instead show that your social media presence consists of people. Skip sanitized marketing-speak.
- Help your employees to strut their Halloween best. Offer to help improve their social media presence and make it look professional. As a result your business looks better!
- Acknowledge and follow people who mention you on social media platforms to build your following. Unlike following top influencers, these social media participants are interested in what you’re saying. Why not reciprocate?
5. Connect and engage on social media
Use social media platforms to expand your marketing reach as well as to engage with the public, your followers and your prospects and customers.
To support these goals, build private or public groups on Facebook and LinkedIn. When in doubt go more targeted. While the number of participants may be lower, it’ll foster greater connections.
Expert tip: Use live events as the starting point for building your community.
Or alternatively, participate in social media communities such as Reddit or Growth Hackers. By being a member and supporting others, you earn the right to get help when you need it.
To illustrate how, Venngage’s Nadya Khoja provides a useful example.
Content Distribution Case Study – Nayda Khoja
Actionable Halloween Social Media Marketing Tips:
- Don’t lurk or you’ll miss the real benefit of social media.
- Expand your social media participation beyond the major networks. For example answer questions on Quora or in targeted groups on Facebook or LinkedIn. Your goal is to become a go-to resource. Spin Sucks’s Gini Dietrich engages on Quora to direct the conversation.
- Leave a sign you’ve visited. Instead of Halloween chalk marks and broken eggs, use @mentions, answer questions and participate in community activities such as Facebook Life events and Twitter chats.
- Spotlight social media shares, Click-to-Tweets and PinIts. Since not everyone’s a wizard, make it easy to share your content on social media platforms.
6. Create and share social media tailored content
Offer a mix of social media content across platforms including social media shares, native content and longer form content.
Where possible create stories related to your brand, company and people because people remember them. People like ghost stories because they engage readers and offer emotional engagement.
Skip the marketing sell and promotion. As my colleague Marcus Sheridan put it best, “They Ask, You Answer.”
Actionable Halloween Social Media Marketing Tips:
- Avoid social media fly-bys with or without your broomstick. This is especially true for secondary platforms.
- Tailor your content to each specific social media platform as you would do with your holiday props. Continue to repurpose content to make it contextually relevant by social media platform and keep it fresh.
- Photograph the zombies because vampires won’t show up in your photographs! Include photos of behind-the-scenes, customers, employees, quotes (or other text), and infographics. Also, ask permission to use photographs and videos of customers and the public, especially if they’re under 13!
- Use video to extend your reach and increase your engagement. Orbit Media’s Andy Crestodina walks you through how to create yours. Further, he shows that it works with business results.
Andy Crestodina proves that social media video yields measurable results.
- Offer treats to influencers and your community in the form of curated content. Share other people’s content via your social media profiles. But ensure that it’s aligned with your brand and company plans! Also test lesser used platforms like Flipboard.
7. Host social media festivities to support and build your community
Social media enables you to participate in and host events and/or groups that help grow your community.
Expert tip: Use live events as the starting point for building your community.
Actionable Halloween Social Media Marketing Tips:
- Welcome trick or treaters to your owned social media home. Invite guest bloggers to create new content on a regular basis. But develop a set of guest blog post guidelines first!
- Host social media festivities. Create social media first events and related content. Take a page from Madalyn Sklar who moves her Twitter Chats to Facebook Live. As a result, Sklar’s audience crosses platforms with her. Use this tactic to build your social media followings across platforms.
- Encourage Halloween visitors to carve jack-o-lanterns. Depending on your business, invite the public and your customers to show their creativity. Then share their work via social media.
- Don’t feed the trolls, regardless of how well they dress. Trolls will just argue and/or complain no matter what you say or do. So ignore them or show them to the door because paying attention to them only encourages their bad behavior.
8. Support your content marketing distribution on social media
To show measurable social media results use a mix of platforms to distribute your content marketing.
At a minimum, offer regular content servings on your primary networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Pinterest. Use tools like Buffer, CoSchedule, AgoraPulse and Hootsuite to batch and streamline your scheduled sharing.
Actionable Halloween Social Media Marketing Tips:
- Don’t fly in on your broomstick to only leave promotional comments. Otherwise, social media participants will view you as a spineless shill. Instead join the social media conversation and engage regularly.
- Use content wizardry to create posts for other blogs and sites. Without being a bloodsucking vampire, raise your social media visibility by offering others quality servings of your content.
- Share your best content by taking advantage of content syndication. Republish content on long-form platforms like LinkedIn Pulse and Medium but do so in moderation! For example, Ryan Holiday gets strong results by updating and republishing older posts on Medium.
Example of how Ryan Holiday attracted additional attention for his republished article on Medium
9. Guide social media visitors to take action
To get the best results for your business, include trackable metrics in your social media postings and advertising.
Further where possible, keep your audience engaged on your social media presence. To this end, Melonie Dodaro includes her LinkedIn and YouTube videos on her LinkedIn Profile. Note the subtle call-to-action for her book, LinkedIn Unlocked!
Melonie Dodaro uses her LinkedIn Profile to get visitors to act
Actionable Halloween Social Media Marketing Tips:
- Use a targeted call-to-action to cast a spell on your social media followers. Make its presentation contextually relevant and include trackable metrics.
- Offer treats for your visitors. Where appropriate, use marketing offers to entice guests to take the next step in your process.
- Take advantage of the moonlight to spotlight influencers and community. Put customers’ names up in lights to make them feel important. Take a page from the pros at Spin Sucks and continually test new options to engage your audience. Here’s Jay Acunzo’s AMA.
Example of how to spotlight influencers and community members via Spin Sucks (on blog and Slack)
10. Monitor both the environment and your business results
Unlike other media, social media allows not only one-to-one and one-to-many communications but also allows many-to-many.
Therefore watch what your followers, audience and competitors say, share and do across key social media networks. Remember that your competitor’s social media problem can easily become yours!
To ensure that your social media marketing yields measurable results, plan and embed your metrics in advance. Here’s a template worksheet to help you.
Actionable Halloween Social Media Marketing Tip:
- Check the neighborhood for signs of spooks and vampires. Use social media monitoring tools to track what’s said about your products, brands, company, senior executives and competitors. When you find something that needs a response, act quickly. Remember there’s no protection against vampires when you invite them into your house!
Halloween Social Media Marketing Tips Conclusion
While Halloween only lasts one night, its spirit can fuel your social media presence going forward.
Use this fun holiday to motivate your marketing and other teams, especially customer service and sales, to get your business’s social media marketing use on track to succeed.
While you’re active on social media, use the opportunity to listen to and engage with your customers and the public more generally to build and deepen your community.
In the process, have a scary good time.
What other Halloween social media marketing tips or tricks do you recommend adding to this list?
Trick or treat,
Heidi Cohen
Photo credit: Heidi Cohen – Use permitted with link to this article.
Note: This post was originally published on October 31, 2011. It has been extensively revised and updated.