Tips for Optimizing Social Media Activity

It’s no surprise that social media must be considered as part of your Black Friday social marketing strategy. After all, it was announced in 2019 by Merkle that over 4% of website traffic comes directly from your social media platforms. However, with social media spanning various platforms (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and more), it isn’t easy to know how to utilize them all to your best advantage over Black Friday. Therefore, we’ve compiled some simple tips that can be used across the board to help you get Black Friday social media ready.

1. Prepare your social media platforms

Think of your social media platforms as your company’s biggest brand awareness asset. It’s where users will look at your branding, your personality, and the tone of voice that your brand has. To correctly display your brand’s message and visuals, your social media profiles must accurately reflect this. Some quick tips for ensuring your social media platforms look correct include:

In particular, Instagram is great for converting buyers. According to Instagram, 70% of ‘shopping enthusiasts’ turn to Instagram for product discovery. So make sure your shopping links are updated for maximum conversion rates, and showcase your products with beautiful, high-quality imagery to show off your brand!

2. Optimise your Instagram bio

In addition to brand awareness, optimizing your bios can help with SEO and increase the chances of users finding you. Research your brand and industry keywords, and make sure to use them in your profile. Take a look at this example below:

The ‘before’ picture isn’t optimized well for SEO. The bio is short and doesn’t interest the reader, with little keywords used, alongside no hashtags or emojis. Additionally, the website linked is to the company’s home page, which doesn’t work as well for converting images into sales.

The ‘after’ picture shows a fully optimized Instagram bio. The caption includes relevant hashtags, along with keywords and contextual emojis. Furthermore, the website linked is a ‘LinkIn Bio’ page. Thus, the user will be met with a website showing Instagram images in a grid, to which they can click through and be greeted with the product shown in each specific image. This helps if a user has seen a particular product in a Black Friday social media post and wants to shop it quickly.

3. Alter your posting schedule

You may have nailed your best times to post throughout the week, with specific hours yielding the best engagement on specific days. However, Black Friday may throw a spanner in the works. With so much social activity happening, your audience may not be sticking to their usual scrolling schedule. If possible, analyze your previous year’s Black Friday social activity and schedule your posts around your audience for these specific dates. If you don’t have access to previous data, put yourself in your buyer’s shoes. Using a buyer persona, run through your day and pinpoint times when your buyer may be most likely to browse online.

4. Consider reactive marketing

Additionally, your scheduled content may need some sprucing around this time of year. Schedule your base posts using a scheduling app (we like to use Hootsuite), but be prepared to include reactive marketing if necessary. Situations such as site crashes, updated discounts or last-minute offers will require quick-thinking posts on all social media platforms. Have a designated person on hand to create quick posts when needed, whether informational or entertaining. Whilst an unofficial campaign, this creative was created for IKEA by Rise at Seven as a reaction to a trend. Remember when Bernie Sanders went viral for sitting on a chair? Rise at Seven quickly hopped on the trend and turned it into an IKEA sales motive. Creating contextual memes and responding to trends is a great way to add creativity to your Black Friday social media posts.

5. Create a sense of urgency

With so many deals from so many vendors with little time, it’s difficult for your audience to focus on one specific item and concentrate. Additionally, it’s hard to stand out amongst the overwhelming advertising noise. Building a sense of urgency is vital to getting baskets checked out and shoppers through the door. No one wants to miss out on a good deal! The FOMO is real, and it’s your job to make it seem like it will be the end of the world if buyers don’t rush to you. Consider using words or phrases that indicate scarcity, such as ‘Limited time deal’, ‘Shop now’, ‘Only today!’. Simply Wigs do an excellent job at encouraging urgency without appearing pushy. ‘Get shopping!’ accompanied with an emoji is a friendly push that doesn’t sound too salesy.

6. Don't use too many buzzwords

Be careful: too many buzzwords can appear frantic. The goal is to encourage the consumer into purchasing something quickly, not to scare them off altogether! Plan your Black Friday social activity so that urgent CTA’s run in dribs and drabs throughout the day to avoid your advertising looking too aggressive.

7. Utilize UGC (user-generated-content)

User-generated content refers to content that previous buyers have created to showcase a product or service. For companies, UGC is gold dust. It helps to attract new buyers through relatable recommendations, encourages brand loyalty and motivates your existing audience. Stay front of mind by drip-feeding UGC into your planned social activity – it offers a fresh perspective from the campaign or stock imagery and helps to keep your brand personality fresh and new. ASOS do a great job at utilizing UGC to promote their products by providing the user with specific product codes, so the item is easy to find on their website.

8. Use a dedicated hashtag

If you want to create a truly holistic campaign that appears more than surface level and will last in consumers minds for longer than a few minutes, using a dedicated hashtag on all social profiles is the way to go. Get witty, clever or funny – you want a hashtag that will stick out and be memorable. By implementing the hashtag across all social profiles, your Black Friday social media campaign looks multi-faceted and well thought-through.

For example, in 2016, Patagonia made history by donating 100% of the sales profit to grassroots environmental charities. The hashtag #loveourplanet was used to promote the campaign. Their projected target was $2 million, however, due to the traction that the hashtag gained across their social media platforms, the company exceeded targets and hit $10 million.

9. Re-think your hashtag strategy

Moreover, re-think your overall hashtag strategy for your Black Friday social media posts around this time of year. Your usual hashtags may not cut through the mud, so you may require a re-jig of old practices. For example, perhaps #GiftsForHer is trending well, or maybe #ChristmasDecor is more up your street. Ensure your hashtags are contextual and relevant and go alongside high-quality imagery to stand out amongst the crowd.

10. Utilize Instagram Shopping

Want to make it even easier to convert Instagram users into actual sales? Adding an Instagram Shop feature to your profile improves the user experience for the consumer, as they can shop your store through your Instagram profile. Creating an Instagram shop is easy and free, helps you increase sales and allows you to tag specific products within your Black Friday social media posts. If you wish to use an Instagram Shop, set it up with plenty of time – the review process can take a few days, so don’t leave it until the last minute!

There are so many more avenues we could explore that will help you elevate your Black Friday social game, but to keep it concise, these are our best bets. Check out our blog for more social media tips, or if you found these tips particularly useful, contact us today to find out how we can help you grow your social media platforms.