Tweet Your Way to Holiday Sale Success

You have, no doubt, been brainstorming new ideas and planning and implementing great campaigns to reach both your loyal customers and potential new fans this holiday season—after all, Black Friday is only a few weeks away, and this year we’ll see fewer shopping days between Thanksgiving and Christmas than in other years, so time is definitely of the essence. One of the most important ideas to keep in mind when you’re developing a marketing strategy is that you need to stay current on how you can deliver your message to a broad audience.

You probably already know how important social media marketing is for getting the word out: it’s easily accessible, it makes customers feel like they know you on a friendly level, and it creates a strong “social signal” that helps your search engine optimization. In light of these advantages, this week we have some great holiday and Black Friday tips for merchants who are using Twitter as a social media microphone this season.

Offer Twitter-Only Sales or Other Promotions

Tweeting exclusive promotions to your followers has multiple benefits: it delivers a message about your great deals to users who are likely to be interested—and it’s an excellent way to add to your followers. If the offer you’re tweeting is exciting enough, your followers will retweet it so that their own friends and followers—users who may not have heard of you or don’t know much about you—will see that your company is one they’d like to keep daily tabs on. This Cyber Monday, for example, be sure to share your most compelling online offers on your Twitter account.

Stay in Touch With Your Customers

A huge part of Twitter’s appeal is that it allows the customer to be in closer contact with you than ever before. Users who hear from you directly feel less like numbers and more like friends, because they find you accessible, responsive, and communicative. This season, be the one to initiate these friendly conversations. Make it a point to tweet several times per week to ask your followers a question about your products or services—e.g. what are they hoping goes on sale for the holidays? What’s on their personal wish list for Santa this year? When a follower answers you, reply back and provide useful information. They’ll get a kick out of hearing from you in such a personalized way and appreciate your assistance.

Worth a Thousand Words—or More

It’s difficult to tell your followers everything you want them to know about who you are and what you have to offer in 140 characters or less. So show them, too. This Black Friday and Cyber Monday, tweet photos of your hottest sellers—not just the product photos from your website, but also cute candids that satisfied customers have sent you. If you’re involved in some holiday community outreach or other charity work, or have decked your office with boughs of holly, snap some photos and share those, too. And if pictures still don’t tell the full story, a 6-second Vine video may get your point across even more effectively.

Collaborate

Did you know that November 30 is Small Business Saturday? This is a great opportunity to
collaborate with other merchants on a meaningful community project or exciting cross-promotion—and to let your Twitter followers know about it. And the timing couldn’t be any better: it’s sandwiched between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, so tons of customers will be on the hunt for exciting sales and savings.

Don’t feel that you have to limit yourself to these ideas—if you’re inspired to tweet
something else that communicates your brand’s message to faithful customers and new
converts alike, have at it! Every time you engage your followers with something really
interesting, useful, or funny, you encourage them to retweet you and reach a new audience.

This holiday season, Twitter is the gift that keeps on giving.