Don’t forget to be social this holiday season

30
Nov

It’s only a hop, skip and jump until Christmas day. End of year parties colour our calendars and employees around the country are booking their leave.

Many businesses either shut down or fall back to a skeleton crew over the holidays so it’s important to include your social media monitoring and engagement into this roster.

If your customers could have operational, service or purchasing issues over this time ensure whoever is on duty is trained up and familiar with your processes to address and answer tweets or Facebook questions.

Hopefully your key staff will be happy to answer the occasional email, tweet replies or share updates on Facebook while they’re on holiday. But if not you’ll need to have an arrangement with your contact center or other staff.

Set up a roster so there’s always someone on ‘Social Media Duty’ throughout the holidays. They might need some training on how to deal with issues, negative posts or answer certain questions.

Make sure you have email alerts set up for DM’s and @mentions on Twitter and wall posts or comments on Facebook.

Check your Google Alerts are set up for company or product mentions in news articles or blog posts.

Create a resource of potential complaints and questions you could get and contact details for people in case the monitoring team need urgent support.

Fill your content calendar with daily posts, links and photos so they can be scheduled or posted by the person on duty.

Think about what advice or content you can share to be useful or entertaining. Take pictures of the office Christmas party, before people have too much to drink.

Add some misteltoe to your Twitter avatar and some presents to your Facebook page and get into the holiday spirit. You could update these for New Years.

To do: Select your ‘on duty’ team, set up the roster, create a support resource, prepare your content calendar, artwork and emergency contact list.

Merry Christmas to you. It’s been fantastic to share my social media insights and tips with you this year. See you in 2012 and in the mean time feel free to tweet me @JustinFlitter.