Halloween has become a huge event in the UK, with consumers spending over £300 million on Halloween products according to Mintel research. Any popular season or special event is the perfect opportunity to ramp up your social media engagement, and the best thing is that you don’t have to sell Halloween items to make the most of this spooky day. In this article I list my top tips for Halloween social media marketing.
Share Your Halloween Tips
No matter what your business is, there is most likely some sort of top Halloween tip you can share with others. Useful ones are good, but funny tips also work well.
For example:
If you’re an events planner you could give your tips on how to throw an unforgettable Halloween party.- If you’re a gardener you could list your top tips on dressing your front garden for Halloween.
- Maybe you’re a nutritionist, so why not do your top 10 most sugar filled sweets to avoid!
- If you fit flooring, how about tips for protecting your floor from a wild Halloween party (or how to clean the floor afterwards!)
- I like these electrical safety tips I found on Twitter (see image) – definitely something you should post if you are an electrician.
You can either share all your tips in one go, or share them as a series of Tweets/Facebook posts over several days (one or two a day). Don’t forget to add images and hashtags to help get your tips noticed.
Dress Your Products for The Season
Social Media is an online virtual shop window, and just like a shop window you can dress your products for the season and showcase them using photos. You may not have Halloween-specific products, but you can still use them to take some really interesting seasonal photos by using props to create a display.
For example, if you sell jewellery, you could pick out any pieces that have a slightly gothic style, and display them with some Halloween props like skeletons or spiders – or could pick out any jewellery you have that has orange in it and create a display with it around a pumpkin. Photograph your creation and post it up on social media with relevant hashtags and emojis for a great visual piece to attract customers.
Get Your Customers Involved
A great way to get customers to participate in your social media around Halloween is to get them involved in the campaign. You can have them suggest ideas, share their photos/videos, participate in polls etc – this creates a lot of engagement and can be great fun. It’s always best to try and keep it partially relevant to your business, but let your imagination run wild!
Here are some ideas:
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Two-Sentence Horror Stories – Indiana Times If you’re a gardener, or perhaps own a garden centre why not do a best decorated garden competition – where users share photos of their Halloween gardens and you pick a winner, or your social media followers pick a winner. I’d say that Facebook would be the best place for this type of competition.
- How about encouraging your customers to share their real ghost stories, or writing a fictional short story? I absolutely love this article where people wrote 2-sentence horror stories (see image), a simple idea but some of them are exceptionally chilling! Something like that would work really well on social media.
- Create a Halloween poll – try and make it related to your business if possible. For example, if you work with money/finance, you could ask people how much they spend on Halloween.
If you put the poll up a few weeks in advance, the poll results could then be used in a blog post or article that you could put live a couple of days before Halloween – it could be titled something like: “The Cost Of Halloween And How To Save Money.” - A great idea if you sell products or offer a service that relates to animals, is to get your followers to share photos of their black cats (as black cats are often associated with witches) – photos of lovely cats are always popular, people love sharing them and you’re sure to get lots of people viewing them.
Good Old Team Spirit
Customers like seeing the people behind a business, it helps with transparency and makes customers feel at ease. So why not get your team involved in some way.
You could:
Have a spooky bake-off, where you all bake cakes with a Halloween theme and judge the best. Then share the photos on your social media. This is particularly timely one as the final of “The Great British Bake Off” will be shown on TV on Halloween, so you can hit two events in one go! Make sure you use hashtags for both events (#Halloween & #GBBO)- Take pictures of your team dressed up for Halloween – try to opt for clever or unusual costumes, so that they stand out. If they are really good you might get a few people sharing the photos!
- Create an interesting or funny video with some of the team. I really love this simple but engaging Halloween video from Chicago Police (see image). It’s just two members of the team giving some safety tips – it’s a great way for people to connect with the department and the people within it. They’ve added a few special effects, but you don’t need to. Just make it interesting, useful, or even funny and it’ll be a great addition to your social media. Plus if you upload it to YouTube it will help your company’s SEO.
If you’d like to create a big Halloween social media campaign, I recommend you also read my previous blog Get Your Social Media Ready for an Event where I talk in-depth on how to plan a campaign around an event or season.
As you can see from my tips, you don’t have to sell Halloween products to be able to take part – there are ideas for so many varied professions, from accountants to gardeners. Have fun with your social media on Halloween, it’s a light-hearted holiday and a good time to let customers see your personality.
[bctt tweet=”From accountants to gardeners, every business can benefit from #Halloween #socialmedia marketing”]
With a little modification, you can use these tips for future events and seasons too – remember, Christmas is just around the corner!
