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Feel like your content inspiration is starting to dry up with the leaves? Creating a fall content calendar can sometimes feel overwhelming. Fall, however, is a great time to connect with your audience and reengage them after summer vacations and time off. We’ve gathered some content ideas to help inspire you in creating your social media posts for the fall season.
One of the most obvious things to include are fall holidays—and there are several to choose from! Many times content managers miss important content opportunities because they wait too long to plan. Even though it is still summer, now is a great time to start thinking about the bigger holidays like Halloween and Thanksgiving so that you can plan effective campaigns.
Ask yourself the following questions:
In addition to noting the big and obvious holidays that all the major companies are doing, you have an opportunity to tap into smaller holidays, too. This could take the form of religious or cultural holidays significant to your ideal audience or fun holidays relevant to your brand.
You can view multiple holiday calendars on your Google calendar. Or even calendars for major sports or regions of the world. This makes it easy to look ahead and see what holidays are coming up in different parts of the world in the upcoming months.
In addition, you can find holidays that might be relevant to your brand or audience via searchable calendars online. These are easy to customize to your brand in a fun way. For example, September is both Baby Safety Month and Classical Music Month. September 19 is Talk Like a Pirate Day.
One of the best parts of planning content like this in advance is that you can incorporate it with your other marketing as well, both in a physical location or online through other media such as an email newsletter. Get creative with it and have fun!
Do you want to take advantage of the fall to do some sales?
Using best practices will help make sure that your sales are a success on and off social media. Before you get started, you need to do more information gathering:
Do not do sales just for the sake of a sale. You also want to be careful about doing sales too frequently otherwise you train your regular customers to simply wait for the next sale to buy. In some cases, it may be better to add a bonus rather than give a price discount.
In some industries, you may never want to do sales. In that case, you can do another type of promotional event around a particular product or service. Or maybe launch something new for the fall. If your industry is one that sales are a regular part of the yearly cycle, then make sure you take the time to look at what was successful and not successful in years past.
And whether you are doing social media from within the company, or as part of an agency, make sure you have buy-in and participation from all the important shareholders.
Is your business dependent on the physical location you are located in? If so, what makes fall special where you are? For example, I live in Michigan. In my state, fall is great for apple picking and taking trips up north to view the fall colors. It is also sweater weather!
Identifying what makes fall special can help you make content that will immediately connect with your audience.
If you are not sure, you can even create content around asking the question to get audience feedback.
If physical location is not important, you can include other themes in your fall content calendar. Remember to make it relevant to both your audience and your brand.
Here are a few to consider:
If you are feeling stuck on this form of content, take some time and review some of your emails or other materials from last year during the fall.
What questions that came up regularly? What did you miss that could have helped your ideal audience?
If you only work in social media at your company or for this client, schedule a phone call with the client or another employee who interacts directly with customers to see what ideas they have about the problems your audience has during this time of year.
Should you post more, less, or the same number of times per week? Should you change your timing at all? This is a perfect time to review your queue of scheduled content and make it fall-friendly. If you are consistently using evergreen content, take the time to review and refresh your social media content regularly.
When you consider the number of posts and times of day, think about the changes your ideal audience members are experiencing for fall. If they are going back to school (or taking kids back to school), their daily schedule is probably different. When they are available to be on social media may change.
Fall is also almost like a second New Year’s, in the sense that many people see this as a fresh start or reset. Take advantage of this! If you have a service-based business, now might be a good time to think about doing a social media challenge (30 days to a cleaner house, for example, if you are an organization consultant). The key is to meet them where they are and create content that will help make their lives better, easier, or at least more fun.
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