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31 Halloween Social Media Marketing Tips You Need To Drive Awesome Results Now

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.

RECOMMENDED READING:
  • 2018 Social Media Usage Has Changed (Research)

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.

Halloween Social Media Marketing Tips

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:

  • Increase brand awareness
  • Grow audience
  • Engage with community, audience and customers
  • Drive website traffic
  • Generate leads and revenue

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

Research chart

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:

  • Don’t let the headless horseman gallop off with your social media. Integrate your documented social media marketing strategy into your overall marketing plan.

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.

Twitter Social Media Marketing Tip

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

Actionable Halloween Social Media Marketing Tips:

  • Dress your social media avatars to show your Halloween spirit. Keep your company avatar aligned with your brand when making holiday changes.
  • Decorate your social media presence by cross-promoting your other social media and owned presence. Add links to your social media profiles to help prospects find you elsewhere on social media.
  • Skip the social media vanishing act by only showing up when the spirit moves you. Consistency matters.
  • Offer a treasure map in the form of your website, email contact, physical address and phone number on your social media profiles to make your business findable.

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:

  • Get to know the real people behind their social media costumes. To learn what drives your followers engage with and survey them. Find out which social media networks they frequent, what their posting schedule is, what type of content they want, and what type of voice they seek.

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:

Social Media Marketing Tip -Facebook Example

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

Actionable Halloween Social Media Marketing Tips:

  • Keep werewolves from eating the heart of your social media. Instead show that your social media presence consists of people. Skip sanitized marketing-speak.
  • Help your employees to strut their Halloween best. Offer to help improve their social media presence and make it look professional. As a result your business looks better!
  • Acknowledge and follow people who mention you on social media platforms to build your following. Unlike following top influencers, these social media participants are interested in what you’re saying. Why not reciprocate?

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.

Social Media Marketing Tip - Nadya Khoja Example

Content Distribution Case Study – Nayda Khoja

Actionable Halloween Social Media Marketing Tips:

  • Don’t lurk or you’ll miss the real benefit of social media.
  • Leave a sign you’ve visited. Instead of Halloween chalk marks and broken eggs, use @mentions, answer questions and participate in community activities such as Facebook Life events and Twitter chats.
  • Spotlight social media shares, Click-to-Tweets and PinIts. Since not everyone’s a wizard, make it easy to share your content on social media platforms.

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:

  • Avoid social media fly-bys with or without your broomstick. This is especially true for secondary platforms.
  • Tailor your content to each specific social media platform as you would do with your holiday props. Continue to repurpose content to make it contextually relevant by social media platform and keep it fresh.
  • Photograph the zombies because vampires won’t show up in your photographs! Include photos of behind-the-scenes, customers, employees, quotes (or other text), and infographics. Also, ask permission to use photographs and videos of customers and the public, especially if they’re under 13!
  • Offer treats to influencers and your community in the form of curated content. Share other people’s content via your social media profiles. But ensure that it’s aligned with your brand and company plans! Also test lesser used platforms like Flipboard.

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:

  • Host social media festivities. Create social media first events and related content. Take a page from Madalyn Sklar who moves her Twitter Chats to Facebook Live. As a result, Sklar’s audience crosses platforms with her. Use this tactic to build your social media followings across platforms.
  • Encourage Halloween visitors to carve jack-o-lanterns.  Depending on your business, invite the public and your customers to show their creativity. Then share their work via social media.
  • Don’t feed the trolls, regardless of how well they dress. Trolls will just argue and/or complain no matter what you say or do. So ignore them or show them to the door because paying attention to them only encourages their bad behavior.

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:

  • Don’t fly in on your broomstick to only leave promotional comments. Otherwise, social media participants will view you as a spineless shill. Instead join the social media conversation and engage regularly.
  • Use content wizardry to create posts for other blogs and sites. Without being a bloodsucking vampire, raise your social media visibility by offering others quality servings of your content.

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:

  • Offer treats for your visitors. Where appropriate, use marketing offers to entice guests to take the next step in your process.

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:

  • Check the neighborhood for signs of spooks and vampires. Use social media monitoring tools to track what’s said about your products, brands, company, senior executives and competitors. When you find something that needs a response, act quickly. Remember there’s no protection against vampires when you invite them into your house!

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.

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