Avoid the fakecation: 4 tips to managing social media over the holidays

by Karen Hall, director, 101 Things

With fruit mince pies already on sale at Coles and Woollies, it’s not too early to think about how you’re going to manage your social media and online presence over the Christmas and New Year holiday period and set yourself up for a true vacation, not a 'Fakecation': being on vacation but spending your whole time on your laptop and work phone. Sound familiar, anyone?

Karen Hall, Director of 101 Things, a specialist Marketing agency for Mortgage Brokers, shares four tips and hacks on how to maintain your presence online without spending your entire Christmas holiday posting updates.

1. Plan early. Plan out your holiday content during October and November, so you have time to write the captions and find or take the photos for December/January. Allowing yourself a bit of planning time also allows your creativity to flow.
2. Use a scheduling tool like Sked, Hootsuite or Buffer, so that your posts can post without you!  And don’t forget LinkedIn - a good free tool for LinkedIn is Postfity.
3. Repurpose your content to get more bang for buck out of each asset. Recently we’ve been helping a lot of clients ‘amplify’ their online presence. Repurposing content across several social media channels allows you to get more value out of the investment (be it time or dollars, or both).  Maybe you’ve created a written article – why not deliver the best bits directly to camera? Or an example I am especially fond of, do this in reverse: transcribe a video you’ve made. Take all of the key content and messages in it and create a blog post.  You could also use the video or the transcription in an e-newsletter, put it on LinkedIn, share it on Facebook and upload it to your YouTube channel. Taking this one step further, dip into the video and pull out some really succinct quotes and create posts of those from this master video. Standalone quotes or quips about something really key or insightful make for great social media content. You could also extract key topics from longer videos and make them standalone posts too.
4. Lastly, another way to make the most of your effort is to create a document that you can promote while you’re on holidays. Grab two or three blog posts and combine them to create a booklet and offer it as a downloadable e-book, white paper or report to give it to your clients for free.  These free reports, e-books, and white papers can then be working for you online, while you are re-energising over the holiday period, and really being present with your family and friends.