Scare off your organization’s social media naysayers with these Halloween social marketing tricks to drive measurable results!

Skip the Halloween treats because, while tasty, the sugar high doesn’t grow anything but your waistline.

Instead use these 31 Halloween social media marketing tips to improve your business results while avoiding the witches, ghosts, vampires and zombies that may lead you astray.

31 Halloween Social Media Marketing Tips

Like any experienced Halloween trick-or-treater, map out your best options to get the best haul.

Focus on getting the best quality candy and treats, instead a lot of sweets you don’t want or like!

For social media marketers, this translates to measurable business results in terms that your CEO and CFO understand.

1. Document your social media marketing goals and strategy

To drive measurable business results from your social media marketing, start with SMART goals (Translation: Specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound) such as:

Research conducted by Dr. Gail Matthew of Dominican University reveals that results improve significantly when goals are not only documented but also shared.

Research proves that to achieve success your goals must documented and shared

Therefore, it’s crucial to document and distribute your social media marketing strategy and goals across your organization.

Actionable Halloween Social Media Marketing Tips:

2. Establish your social media presence

Don’t be a social media ghost! It spooks potential visitors.

Instead complete and update your social media profiles.

Then optimize your profile based on each social media platform guidelines. Provide complete and up-to-date information about your company.

Where possible push the boundaries without breaking the platform’s guidelines. For example, check out how Twitter expert Madalyn Sklar maximizes the platform’s profile.

How To Take Full Advantage of Your Twitter Profile – Example: Madalyn Sklar

Actionable Halloween Social Media Marketing Tips:

3. Know Your Audience

Make sure that your social media followers aren’t just spooks and ghosts!

Why?

Because your social media marketing success depends on developing relationships with real people. Over time, they become a community.

Need help?

Try Sparktoro’s SparkScore, a new tool that lets you measure the true influence of your Twitter followers as well as the proportion of fake follwers. (BTW, did I tell you that it’s free?) Even better, it provides a roadmap to help you improve the engagement and power of your account. 

Actionable Halloween Social Media Marketing Tips:

4. Be Human

Social media underscores The Cluetrain Manifesto’s revelation that the web consists of people talking in human voices. Specifically, it states:

“Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.” —The Cluetrain Manifesto

For example, examine how Facebook expert Amy Porterfield talks to her audience:

Check out how Facebook expert Amy Porterfield uses her image to support her business

Actionable Halloween Social Media Marketing Tips:

5. Connect and engage on social media

Use social media platforms to expand your marketing reach as well as to engage with the public, your followers and your prospects and customers.

To support these goals, build private or public groups on Facebook and LinkedIn. When in doubt go more targeted. While the number of participants may be lower, it’ll foster greater connections.

Expert tip: Use live events as the starting point for building your community.

Or alternatively, participate in social media communities such as Reddit or Growth Hackers. By being a member and supporting others, you earn the right to get help when you need it.

To illustrate how, Venngage’s Nadya Khoja provides a useful example.

Content Distribution Case Study – Nayda Khoja

Actionable Halloween Social Media Marketing Tips:

6. Create and share social media tailored content

Offer a mix of social media content across platforms including social media shares, native content and longer form content.

Where possible create stories related to your brand, company and people because people remember them. People like ghost stories because they engage readers and offer emotional engagement.

Skip the marketing sell and promotion. As my colleague Marcus Sheridan put it best, “They Ask, You Answer.” 

Actionable Halloween Social Media Marketing Tips:

Andy Crestodina proves that social media video yields measurable results.

7. Host social media festivities to support and build your community

Social media enables you to participate in and host events and/or groups that help grow your community.  

Expert tip: Use live events as the starting point for building your community.  

Actionable Halloween Social Media Marketing Tips:

#SocialROI “After” Chat Recap with host Madalyn Sklar and guest Heidi Cohen talking about Content Creation For The Solopreneur.

Posted by ManageFlitter on Tuesday, October 9, 2018

8. Support your content marketing distribution on social media

To show measurable social media results use a mix of platforms to distribute your content marketing.

At a minimum, offer regular content servings on your primary networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Pinterest. Use tools like Buffer, CoSchedule, AgoraPulse and Hootsuite to batch and streamline your scheduled sharing.

Actionable Halloween Social Media Marketing Tips:

Example of how Ryan Holiday attracted additional attention for his republished article on Medium

9. Guide social media visitors to take action

To get the best results for your business, include trackable metrics in your social media postings and advertising.

Further where possible, keep your audience engaged on your social media presence. To this end, Melonie Dodaro includes her LinkedIn and YouTube videos on her LinkedIn Profile. Note the subtle call-to-action for her book, LinkedIn Unlocked! 

Melonie Dodaro uses her LinkedIn Profile to get visitors to act

Actionable Halloween Social Media Marketing Tips:

Example of how to spotlight influencers and community members via Spin Sucks (on blog and Slack)

10. Monitor both the environment and your business results

Unlike other media, social media allows not only one-to-one and one-to-many communications but also allows many-to-many.

Therefore watch what your followers, audience and competitors say, share and do across key social media networks. Remember that your competitor’s social media problem can easily become yours!

To ensure that your social media marketing yields measurable results, plan and embed your metrics in advance. Here’s a template worksheet to help you.

Actionable Halloween Social Media Marketing Tip:

Halloween Social Media Marketing Tips Conclusion

While Halloween only lasts one night, its spirit can fuel your social media presence going forward.

Use this fun holiday to motivate your marketing and other teams, especially customer service and sales, to get your business’s social media marketing use on track to succeed.

While you’re active on social media, use the opportunity to listen to and engage with your customers and the public more generally to build and deepen your community.

In the process, have a scary good time.

What other Halloween social media marketing tips or tricks do you recommend adding to this list?

Trick or treat,
Heidi Cohen

Photo credit: Heidi Cohen – Use permitted with link to this article.

Note: This post was originally published on October 31, 2011. It has been extensively revised and updated.