How to Manage Your Social Media Accounts During the Holidays

Are you wondering how to manage your social media accounts during the holidays?

Not sure if it’s wrong to take some time off from social media?

There are a few different ways that you can be active on social media during the holidays and still be present with your family and friends during the holiday season. You can simply tell people you won’t be online, or you can plan ahead and still appear active online, while still enjoying yourself offline.

Listen Now

Here are a few ways you can tell your audience you won’t be online, and some tips for maximizing your time on social media so that you appear active but really aren’t spending your whole time online.

Tell your audience

Sunny Lenarduzzi, who is a popular YouTuber, has her own online courses to teach YouTube and is amazing on social media simply tells her audience she’s not going to be active on social media.

She shares a story of why she’s taking time off from being on social media and posts a cute photo of herself. This is a very fun and authentic way of letting your audience know that you need time off too and if they message you, they might not get a response.

Could you do something like this? Absolutely.

Take an appropriate photo of you relaxing, a photo with your family, or maybe share an image of a tropical destination that you are going to over the holidays.
Write a story about why you are taking a ‘digital detox’ of your own.
Tell your audience how to contact you or when they can reach you again.
If you need to have an outlet for people to contact you, identify that method here, whether it’s sending an email or direct them to your contact page on your website.

By writing out detailed instruction and information about when you are returning, your audience will know exactly when they can contact you again.

Create a Challenge

Although this challenge wasn’t specifically for the holidays, Mike Smith created this cool video and challenged kids to a digital detox.

You could do something similar and challenge your audience to a digital detox with you.

Tell your audience that you are taking time to be present for the holidays and let them know for how long.
Ask them if they would like to join you in the challenge.
Create a little mini-community of people who are giving each other ‘the present of being present’.

When your business needs to be active on social media

Sometimes there are situations where you either need to be active on social media because your business uses it as a customer service tool, or maybe you simply don’t want to go silent on social media. There is nothing wrong with that, but there are some ways to make it easier on you.

Manage Your Facebook Messages

One way to effectively manage your social media on Facebook is to adjust your message settings.

Go to Settings
Messaging
Scroll down to Response Assistant

In Response Assistant you can adjust your response time so that if someone does visit your page, they know that you will respond within a few hours, or a day.

Depending on when you know you can respond to messages, adjust this accordingly.

Another great feature to use within Facebook Messenger is to Show a Messenger Greeting

Scroll to the bottom and change your Show a Messenger Greeting from No to Yes.
Follow the prompts to adjust your message.
Draft a new message to welcome people who send your Facebook Page a message.

This is a good feature because you could write something like ‘Happy holidays! Thanks for your message! We are doing our best to respond to all our messages within 1 day however we are spending time with our families, so if you require immediate assistance, please email email@yourcompany.com for faster response’.

There are also chat bots available that you can use to help with your customer service responses, but I haven’t used these enough to give any advice on them. The chatbot I did use briefly was Many Chat, and they offer tutorials and training to help you get set up.

Plan Ahead and Schedule

If you want your social media accounts to remain active during the holidays (because people will be checking social media during the holidays), planning ahead and scheduling will help so you can at least be worry-free that you don’t need to think of a post.

For more in-depth social media planning resources, grab my free social media course and get a content calendar, social media planner for the year, and video tutorials to get your social media planned and organized.

Tools to use to schedule:

Facebook scheduler- one of the easiest ways to schedule on Facebook is to do it directly on Facebook
Hootsuite– it’s a free tool and easy to use, so if you’re getting started with scheduling, it’s a great tool to test
Buffer– easily re-share posts using Buffer
Hiplay– I connect Hiplay and Buffer to keep my Twitter profile and LinkedIn account updated
Quuu– select categories of content that you want to share so you constantly have articles to share on social media.

Need more scheduling information? Read How to Choose the Best Social Media Management Tool for Your Business

Planning your posts ahead of time and scheduling those posts will help give you peace-of-mind over the holidays and let you be present with your family and friends.

Holiday-Themed Social Media Post Ideas

If you aren’t sure what content to post for Christmas and the holiday season, I love using Promo Republic for ideas. They have a database of over 6000 social media post ideas and you can choose from any of their awesome templates to use for your own social media accounts.