4 WAYS TO INCORPORATE HALLOWEEN INTO YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING STRATEGY

Who doesn’t just love Halloween – horror movies, scary décor, trick or treating (and all that free candy…)!  I know some people (yes, adults) who go more nuts at Halloween than they do at Christmas.  According to Statistics Canada, we spent 331 million dollars on Halloween candy in 2009!  And, according to Value Village’s 2011 annual Halloween shopping survey, the average Canadian planned to spend $300.00 on this very special occasion last year!   

 

Think it might be time for you to scare up some social media marketing tactics to take advantage of this ‘spooktacular’ (sorry, I couldn’t resist) time of year??  Here are a few tricks and treats you might want to try:

1.  Post some Halloween related photos to get yourself and your fans into the spirit.  You can change your profile photos out for something Halloweenie, too, but try to still relate the photos  as much as possible to your business to keep up your branding efforts.  Change out your Facebook business page’s Timeline cover photo for maximum effect. 

2.  Hold a fun Halloween contest for all of your fans, employees and clients to enjoy.  You could have a “Best Costume” or “Wildest Jack-O-Lantern” contest, whereby you could have fans post photos of their costumes or jack-o-lanterns to your page and whoever has the best, wins a prize.  The prize could be anything from a big bag of treats to tickets to a horror movie.  This is a great way to engage with your network.

3.  Post a whole Halloween-related campaign.  A great example of this:   Mike’s Hard Lemonade’s  “Zombie of the Day” campaign.  They used a Facebook application called the “Zombifier”, with which users could upload photos of themselves, and transform themselves into zombies by choosing from a series of horrifying eyes, noses, mouths, wounds, scars and splatter, and clicking & dragging these features over their photos until the desired horrifying effect was achieved.  Every new zombie was featured in a photo gallery and the company posted a new and different “Zombie of the Day” each day. Very cool and so much fun.  And, very smart:  you had to “Like” their page in order to participate!!  

4.  Host a social, Halloween-themed event to network and generate buzz.  It could be a costume party or haunted-house tour.  Promote your event on Facebook and LinkedIn – it’s so easy to do.  Get a bunch of people in your network together and enjoy.   Another great way to engage, engage, engage!!