Are you stuck for social media campaign ideas this summer season? Do you find it hard to come up with creative seasonal campaigns for your social media marketing plan? Look no further! In this blog post, we’ll walk you through some social media campaign ideas for you to try out this summer.
Creating a consistent, relevant posting calendar is a must in social media marketing, but it can also be difficult to come up with new ideas for your brand constantly. Luckily, there are always new trends and ideas that you can use as inspiration and adapt to your brand.
Refresh Your Feed
You can spice up your social media posts during the summer by running campaigns themed around summer-related items, activities, or concepts. Summer in the UK is especially associated with food and drink, for example ice creams, fresh brightly coloured fruit, and tasty beverages. A common theme here is refreshing yourself from the heat (when we are blessed with it), so why not refresh your social media feeds in the summertime too?
Consider seasonal variations of your branding that feature the same logos, primary colours, and fonts, but with extra summer flair. For highly visual platforms such as Instagram, this will keep your feed looking cohesive while you branch out into new looks for each season. Even platforms with a wide mix of formats, such as Facebook, call for well-made, high-quality visual content in order to succeed.
Coca Cola does this incredibly well – their seasonal branding leading into summer 2021 is vibrant with bright secondary colours to accompany their staple red and white. By contrast, in autumn and winter, their branding is more muted and almost entirely red and white, especially around Christmastime. This is a great example of a brand adapting their content and style to fit the context, providing much-needed variety to their visuals and keeping their profile looking fresh.
Celebrate Hashtag Holidays & National Days
We all know and love hashtag holidays. From #NationalSelfieDay to International #CharityDay, there are plenty of hashtag holidays scattered throughout summer to help inspire your social media posts. While some are tied to official organisations, others are just a bit of fun. If only #NationalDonutDay was a recognised bank holiday…
Try to make sure that the hashtag holidays you incorporate into your summer social media schedule are at least somewhat relevant to your brand, product, or service. Bonus points for extremely topical references; for instance, International #LiteracyDay (8th September 2021) would be perfectly relevant for an independent bookstore or book publisher to post about and spread awareness to their followers.
In addition to national hashtag holidays, the summer bank holiday in August is another good opportunity to create relevant social media campaigns to engage your followers. For B2C businesses especially, brands can benefit from the increased free time and spending habits of consumers at the start of summer and around the time of the August bank holiday.
Run a Summer Competition or Giveaway
People love freebies, and summer is the perfect time to entice your audience with a nice giveaway or competition. Think about what your brand has to offer to competition winners – it could be a basket full of free products, an extended free trial of your service, or a discount code/gift card for your store. In return, your brand’s social media pages will see higher engagement and reach from people sharing your competition post or tagging their friends for an entry in the giveaway.
We’re a firm believer that influencer marketing will only keep getting bigger. When you partner with an influencer to run a giveaway or competition, your brand will reach a new audience with the added long-term potential to turn giveaway entrants into customers. If you’re looking to increase brand awareness or reach, asking entrants to share your giveaway post to their story will help you reach new eyes. For page growth, you may want to consider asking entrants to follow your page as part of the giveaway entry terms.
Once you’ve established your goal, you can continue with planning your influencer giveaway/competition. This will include which influencer you’ll work with and on which platforms, what the prize will be, the timeline of the event, creating landing pages, and establishing your pre-competition metrics so as to more easily track results.
Optimise for Mobile Viewing
Social platforms are becoming incredibly mobile-focused, with increasingly more users visiting social networks primarily on mobile devices. Approximately 78% of social media users access social networks exclusively through their mobile phones, proving that it is key to optimise your content for mobile. Moreover, mobile phone usage goes up during the summer season as people are out-and-about more often.
When you’re always creating social media content using your computer, it can be easy to lose that mobile-first focus. Luckily, social media has kept up with the mobile trend and even third-party social media scheduling websites will let you preview posts on mobile as well as desktop. This will help you perfect the finer details of your social media posts and ensure they’re mobile-ready.
Furthermore, make sure that any landing pages or organic links– whether they’re to your own website or another source – are mobile-friendly. Dynamic, mobile-friendly websites are regarded as being of higher quality by advertising algorithms and real users alike as they’re viewed well on all devices and browsers. Don’t let your summer ad campaign down by linking to a non-optimised or hard-to-use website; make sure landing pages and links go to mobile-friendly and dynamic websites.
If you tend to get stuck planning seasonal content, check out our other blog posts about seasonal social media posts. Alternatively, get in touch with us today to see how we can bring your social media content to life.
