Top Tips For Christmas Social Media Advertising

If you think you’ve missed the boat by not planning a social media strategy for Christmas, then do not fear, there’s still time to get your ass in gear. First things first, get your organic content in order and ensure you’ve got enough relevant posts going out each week to promote various elements of your business. Don’t go full-on sales mode, think about engagement and what people will want to share, like and comment on. It could be that you host a competition in the run-up to the festive season to boost your engagement so that more of your posts are seen. Work that algorithm!

Social Media advertising doesn’t have to cost you thousands of pounds, it could be that you only have £100 to put towards ads but whatever you do ensure you test, measure and check them. Here are some of our top tips for getting your Christmas social media advertising up and running.

Create a Facebook Business Manager account and ensure your ad account and pages are listed here. For one thing, it’s easier to manage and you can also use the Facebook Ads app on the go to track how they are performing.

Christmas Social Media Advertising on Facebook & Instagram

Begin by looking at the campaign level, here you can:

• Set an advertising objective to define what you want your ad to achieve, i.e. brand awareness, reach, traffic, engagement 
• Each campaign can include multiple ad sets, each with different targeting, scheduling and budgeting options selected. If we’ve lost you, the key is to keep it simple.

Ads Manager will then take you through to the ad set level where you can create your ads and also:

• Choose your placements, which channels and where you want the ads to appear on these platforms. Create story ads separately to main feed ads to test and generate different results, we often find story ads in their own campaign deliver at a cheaper result.
• Build your audience, think about your customer demographic when you select your targeting, i.e. age, location, interests and use existing data to create look-a-like audiences where possible.
• Set your budget and schedule, we always set a lifetime budget so you don’t get stung by accidentally adding a daily budget without an end date
• Optional; set your bid, i.e. the most you’re willing to pay for a result

Next up is the ad level where you build what they will look like, here you can create:

• Your ad and view what your audience will see
• Upload one or more images, slideshow or a video
• Fill in the details of your ad, including copy and header
• Add a call to action button, usually linking back to your website but ensure the customer journey is right before sending them there otherwise you risk wasting money and not converting people to sign up, read more or physically book/buy something from you.

Examples of the different ad formats you can build

Another way to grow your sales is to create a Facebook and Instagram Shop so that customers can buy directly from your social accounts, it also means that you can tag your products in pictures to get people there easily. There are two ways you can set up a Facebook store: do it directly on Facebook or use a third-party e-commerce application like BigCommerce or Shopify.  

Once your Facebook Shop is set up, this will pull through to your Instagram page and allow you to tag products there also. Note your accounts must be linked correctly and your Instagram must be set up as a business profile.

When setting up your Christmas social media advertising, think about last delivery times or how long a product takes to make or whether you have availability for a restaurant booking when your ad is running, you want to maximise the return so ensure the journey is a seamless one.

Another top tip to track your return is installing the Facebook Pixel which you can read more about on our blog here.

We hope that helps in getting your Christmas social media advertising going. If you need help with your social strategy for 2020 then join us on our School of Social course for ‘Building an Organic Social Media Strategy‘.