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The holidays are a great time to use Instagram to connect with more people. Everyone is in a festive mood, there are lots of good opportunities for unique photos, and the holiday season is a great time to give your online community a peak into your business’ “human” side.
Whether it’s the current holiday season or one at another time of the year, the following 4-step formula will help you prepare and optimize your content strategy on Instagram.
Step #1: Determine your Goals
Are you using holiday-themed content to offer sales or special promotions? Is this an opportunity to give people an inside look at you/your employees/your business? Will you be sharing or promoting a cause or charity?
Once you’ve identified your goal(s), then determine how many holiday-related posts you’ll be sharing on Instagram along with your regular content.
Keep in mind that most people post 1-2 times per day, and if you suddenly increase your daily posts by a large number, you may risk turning off some of your current Followers.
Step #2: Identify Top Holiday Hashtags and Choose the Ones that Work for You
There are a variety of tools to help you find appropriate and popular hashtags:
Hashtagify.me – shows related hashtags across social networks
Webstagram – shares the top 100 hashtags on Instagram
Tagboard – displays posts (on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter) containing whatever hashtag you search for
Instagram Search – find photos and accounts by searching for a specific hashtag on the App itself
Use a tool to save your top hashtags for holiday posts. I use Evernote to save my frequently-used hashtags. You simply create a Notebook (and call it something like “Top Hashtags”), then create Notes in that notebook for your hashtags.
For example, you could have a Note containing Christmas-related hashtags, a second Note for New Year’s-related hashtags, a third Note for Halloween-related hashtags, etc. Then you simply copy and paste the hashtags from the Evernote App to your Instagram post.
Step #3: Plan and Create your Holiday Posts
Whatever type of content you want to share during the holidays, you can save time with a few free tools and systems:
Canva has an Instagram post template that you can use to make several pieces of content at once. The template is automatically sized at 640 x 640 pixels.
Photography session: Take a bunch of holiday-themed photos at one time (or at one event) so you have multiple images to use in your content calendar.
Evernote for photo transfers: If you have photos on your desktop, use Evernote to download them onto your phone. Just attach an image to a Note within Evernote, and then access and save it on your phone.
Optimal posting times: If you haven’t used Iconosquare to determine the best time(s) to post on Instagram, make sure you check it out. You want to give your holiday posts the best chance to be seen by your Followers.
Step #4: Put a Plan in Place to Promote your Holiday Posts
You can link your Instagram account to Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr to share across platforms. Note that sharing to Twitter displays your photo as a link. Use a “recipe” from IFTTT (If This Then That) to display your Instagram posts as photos on Twitter.
You can create a widget to share Instagram posts on your WordPress blog. Or embed individual Instagram posts on your website or blog.
Or maybe you want to make your holiday-themed content exclusive to Instagram. In this case, you may want to promote the occasional Instagram post on your other social sites and drive traffic back to your Instagram account.
So there are 4 easy steps to create and promote holiday-themed content on Instagram. You can use this formula for any holiday or special event throughout the year as another way to connect with your target audience.
Image courtesy of MorgueFile