Top 5 Tips for Creating a Delectable Thanksgiving Social Media Strategy

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Thanksgiving Social Media Strategy

For businesses, Thanksgiving is about more than turkey dinners and pumpkin pie. It is also a time to grow your reach and improve your engagement.

But it can be difficult to decide how best to utilise social media to reach out to new target markets, and eventually improve sales.

In this article, you will find five tips that will help you create a delectable Thanksgiving social media strategy.

1. Partner with an Influencer for Thanksgiving

Influencer marketing is going from strength to strength and you should be capitalising on this trend, especially for events such as Thanksgiving.

There are a number of benefits to partnering with an influencer for your content marketing strategy. Influencers have a wider, and often a very different, reach than brands do.

Research influencers within your sphere and offer them a partnership opportunity to capitalise on the Thanksgiving holiday.

Points to Note for Thanksgiving Influencer Marketing

Remember that if an influencer is going to promote your products or services for Thanksgiving, they should be given something in return.
Most influencers will take a flat fee, but others could ask for products in return. Negotiate with them according to your needs but keep in mind that this is their job.
An influencer doesn’t have to have millions of followers to be considered for your campaign. Micro-influencers can have a positive impact on your reach, as well. Here’s a free template to reach out to influencers.
Give your influencers guidelines. Your brand has its voice, and the influencer has theirs. While a partnership is supposed to be an amalgam of both voices, you need to see what will work best for your audience.
Analyse your campaign results. You won’t know whether a partnership has been successful unless you examine it and learn what worked, and what needs improvement.

Ways to Optimize Influencer Marketing

Once you have agreed on an influencer to partner with, here are a few ways your influencer can work with your Thanksgiving campaign.

Social Media Takeover

Influencers can take over your social media for Thanksgiving, sharing their day with your followers through tweets, Snaps, and Instagram posts.

Live Video

Another aspect of the takeover is live video—influencers go live using your accounts to share Thanksgiving messages, offers, or a look into their lives on the occasion.

Blogging

You can also partner with influencers who write blogs. They can share their input about the holiday, cooking tips, celebration tips, and more. These blogs can then be shared on social media with relevant hashtags.

Vlogs

With video marketing being so popular, YouTube vlogs are a great way to attract audiences, especially if you have an influencer sharing their Thanksgiving tips on your vlog.

There are a number of ways that Influencers can improve your Thanksgiving social media strategy, and you should seriously consider finding influencers to partner with.

2. Host a Lucrative Competition

Reality television has made competitions a lucrative business, especially as so many of them have an online or social media voting system.

Why not take a leaf out of television’s book for your Thanksgiving campaign and hold a competition for your followers?

Social media competitions can be conducted using online resources that create stunning landing pages that will improve reach and engagement.

Alternately, you can create simple polls and quizzes on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, or host sweepstakes, ask followers to tag friends in the comments, or to share your post.

While it can be difficult to decide what kind of prizes to offer, Wishpond have a list of 100 prize ideas that you can use for inspiration.

3. Hold a UGC Campaign

#Thanksgiving is a time for turkey and gratefulness! Share your favourite traditions with us. #MyCanadaLife pic.twitter.com/iZA84Cwxmi

— Canada Life (@canadalifeco) September 29, 2019

Users are never more willing to engage with your brand than during events such as Thanksgiving.

Which is why it is the perfect time to run a user generated content (UGC) campaign, which makes for excellent visual content marketing.

If you’re wondering how to involve users in your social media, here are some ideas to encourage users to participate:

Share your best Thanksgiving dinner tips
Publish your family’s turkey recipe
Share your favourite/ least favourite Thanksgiving memory
Tell us what you are thankful for
Share photos of your Thanksgiving dinner
Share photos of yourself with the brand’s products

These are just a few ways to gather user generated content that you can feature on your social media platforms.

You should also create a hashtag that will make it easier to collect content and analyse your UGC campaign.

A user generated content campaign is a great way to get more followers on Facebook and Instagram, and will improve your engagement.

4. Make it an (Office) Family Affair

Thanksgiving is about families—the image of Thanksgiving that pops into everyone’s mind when discussing the occasion is of a family seated around a dining table.

And brands need to leverage that view for their Thanksgiving campaigns. Make Thanksgiving a family affair, by involving the office family on social media campaigns.

Use Thanksgiving as an opportunity to highlight employees—their contributions, efforts, and what makes them special.

Ask employees to share their Thanksgiving stories or photos of their Thanksgiving family dinner for your social media posts, or on live video.

Employees could also share their Thanksgiving cooking successes, or failures, to liven up your social feeds.

Highlighting your employees on social media for Thanksgiving will showcase your company culture, which is fast becoming more important for millennial and Gen Z audiences to engage with brands.

5. Take Up a Social Cause on Social Media

Thanksgiving is generally seen as an occasion to celebrate the landing of the pilgrims in the Americas.

But it is important to remember that not everyone considers Thanksgiving a family holiday—for Native Americans and the Indigenous people of Canada, Thanksgiving is a painful reminder of the devastation their people have suffered.

In the digital age, social media is a great way to show your support for a social cause like the plight of indigenous people.

Take up the cause of the native people on Thanksgiving, and share their stories and perspectives on your social channels.

Encourage your followers to give to indigenous charities (and donate part of your budget, as well). Volunteer to help rebuild homes, find ways to provide clean water and electricity to reservations.

Don’t do all this just to highlight your contributions to society, however—if you treat helping others as nothing more than a promotional exercise, it will impact your brand reputation negatively.

Instead, use Thanksgiving as a gateway to find ways to help marginalised communities in the long-term.

Not only will this set you apart from most other brands, but it will make a discernible difference within your community, and encourage others to do the same.

Key Takeaways

Thanksgiving is a time of togetherness and enjoyment (for some) and you can use the occasion to not only boost your social media presence, but to make changes in the world around you.

Partner with influencers who can grow your reach and diversify your content. Hold competitions that are fun and lucrative.

Host a user generated content campaign to create bridges between you and your followers.

Get your employees involved by highlighting them on social media and showcasing your company culture.

Do something different and take up a social cause on behalf of wronged native people and marginalised communities.

With these five tips, you can create a Thanksgiving social media strategy that will taste as good as it looks.

About the author

Ronita Mohan is a content marketer at Venngage, the online infographic template and design platform.

She enjoys writing about productivity, design, social media, the digital world, as well as pop culture and diversity.
Twitter: @Venngage