4 Ways To Incorporate Halloween In Your Social Media Marketing
If social media is a great opportunity to engage your audience and turn your marketing into a conversation, holidays are the perfect catalyst. Especially special occasions like Halloween, which the majority of your audience will celebrate without controversy. Halloween offers you a perfect opportunity to get your audience to talk about and engage with your brand.
Of course, your efforts need to be strategic in order to be successful. So with a bit under two months to prepare for the big day, here are 4 ways you can incorporate Halloween into your social media marketing.
1) Run A Halloween Photo Contest
For millions of Americans, Halloween means exactly one thing: dressing up. Costume parties and trick or treating is not just popular among families with small children, but adults of all ages. In fact, an estimated 68 million Americans dressed up for the day last year. So why not tap into that excitement?
Here's one way you can do that: run a photo contest on social media. Encourage your followers to submit their costumed photos for a brand-related prize. You can even allow the same followers to vote for the winner, which will maximize engagement by prompting additional social shares.
2) Join In Popular Hashtags
As October 31 approaches, more and more users will begin to share their thoughts on the day, spooky movies, or costume parties under popular hashtags like #Halloween, #oct31, #creepy, #spooky, and so on. Your goal should be to join these hashtags with tweets, posts, and updates related to the countless conversations.
That last part, though, is crucial. Arbitrarily inserting yourself into conversations if your content doesn't match up can actually drive negative attention toward your business. Instead, only seek out hashtags and post content that actually make sense for your brand.
3) Explore New Angles For Your Visuals
Quick trivia: what makes scary movies so spooky? More often than not, in addition to the music, it's the camera angles and lighting. The flashlight-from-below example of that statement is iconic, and instantly gets viewers in the right mood.
To be successful on social media, visuals matter. During the weeks before Halloween, begin to experiment with angles on these visuals that closely relate to popular spooky movies. Handheld, shaky videos, low lighting, and off angles can all have a spooky effect that position your images and videos for the season.
4) Run A Mysterious Count Down
Countdowns are a great way to get your social media excited about an upcoming event or product release. But what if they don't even know what you're counting down toward? If you do it just right, you can get both attention and engagement simply from audience curiosity.
Of course, you need to start with something to count down toward. This may be a special sales event, a new product release, or anything else your audience may get excited about. Don't tell them about it as the countdown starts, but give them continuous clues that encourage guessing.
A riddle, a cropped picture of the product, or other hints can help get your audience excited. If you keep the theme spooky with the tips suggested above, you can ensure that by the time the content is finished, you will have your audience's full attention.
Holidays like Halloween offer marketers a perfect opportunity to engage their audience with timely messages and promotions on social media. But to be successful, you have to carefully and strategically plan out your efforts well ahead of time. If you need help in that endeavor, or if you simply need that much-needed boost of creativity to make your social media presence successful this Halloween, contact us.
