The holidays are fast approaching! Whether you’re looking to spend time with your family, lay on the beach or just unplug, the last thing you want to be doing is working.
However, many of your clients and prospects will still be using their devices. They will be on Facebook. They will be on Instagram. You don’t want to be left behind and there’s no reason your marketing machine can’t continue through to the new year with a little planning.
An easy and effective solution is to schedule posts to go out during the holidays. You still want to check in to see what’s happening on your feed, but responding to a comment or message feels a lot less like work than trying to find a dozen pieces of content and time to post them all.
I recommend reposting the most popular pieces of content you shared during the year. You want to avoid republishing listings and open houses, but chances are that a post like your city’s best mac and cheese will still be of interest. You can have fun with it – share the most popular post of March 2018 and hashtag it with #mostpopular on Instagram or Twitter. If the posts were popular originally, they will be popular again. You can also schedule photos and a holiday message for Christmas and New Year’s.
Using a site like Hootsuite (free for up to three social networks – I have no professional affiliation with them) makes it a breeze to identify the most popular posts by running a report. If you’re posting directly to Facebook, go into Facebook insights and do a scan of which posts had the most engagement.
To do the actual scheduling, you have two options:
If you’re using a tool like Hootsuite, you can schedule posts to all of your social networks from this site. You can even customize the message for each network if you like.
Facebook also allows you to schedule posts. Once you have created your posts, you should see a ‘share now’ button with an arrow. Click on that button and you have options including schedule.
Now your social media channels will have content every day for 12 days while you sit back and enjoy some well-deserved down time.
When it comes to your email marketing over the holidays, I recommend that your monthly newsletter be sent before Dec. 15. After that, people get mired down by everything happening around the holidays and open rates go way down. You can still send a card by email closer to the 25th and expect a decent open rate, but keep it short and sweet.
Mark Brodsky has been working with Realtors since 2008, producing monthly newsletters and social media management. Send him an email or visit his website.
