The @intSchools #SocialAdvent challenge
It has reached that odd part of November where Christmas enthusiasts really start gearing up for Christmas, and Christmas traditionalists gawp at all the festivities coming down the chimney a month too early.
Regardless of your stance on when Christmas should start, planning in an effective seasonal marketing campaign is an incredible way to get lots of engagement. Of course, having enough content to do this can be difficult to arrange. This is why, for the past three years, we have run our #SocialAdvent challenge.
A sneak peak of this year's challenges - can you guess what they might be?
What is the #SocialAdvent Challenge?
The aim of the game is simple - each day we will Tweet out a challenge for your school to take part in. This could be anything from posting a short festive video from the Head or putting your carolling skills to the test. At the end of the day we will pick a winner and add them to our #SocialAdvent calendar.
Last year's winners
Why take part?
For one, it is LOTS of fun! There's a real buzz in the office atmosphere whenever the #SocialAdvent period comes up. Not only do we get to take part ourselves (lead by example) but we get to to see all the creative and hilarious acts you Tweet out to the world.
The second, key reason, is: it gets GREAT engagement. Not only will your parents, pupils, teachers and prospectives like, RT and reply to your posts it will drive engagement out to new people. How? This event uses a simple #SocialAdvent hashtag - so if 30 schools are doing this daily and using this one hashtag across all their posts the audience it can reach goes way up. Obviously this number goes up exponentially the more schools that are involved!
You couldn't ask for a better 25 days to make new connections!
The third reason is: you will ✨STAND OUT✨ in the marketing game. Of course you want lots of engagement from your audience, but they key to take away from this is after that engagement has been and gone you want to stick in your audiences' mind! This event is one such way to effectively work towards that.
REACH
Last year, there were over 2 million impressions on the #SocialAdvent hashtag. On our own account, we had 191.7K impressions. Impressive stuff!
1.7% was the average engagement rate per #SocialAdvent tweet, when 0.07% is the average engagement rate for the top 25 brands.
And when $35 billion was spent on social media advertising in 2016, it's worth considering that #SocialAdvent is FREE!
Finally, 200+ schools and school leaders took part on #SocialAdvent 2015 - can we beat it this year?
#SocialAdvent 2015
Last year was by far our most successful, and we would like to extend our deepest gratitude to those schools who took part. This would not work without you guys so thank you 😆.
Last year, @NotreDameCobham kicked off #SocialAdvent with this festive message!
We have created a two-part Twitter Moment⚡️ to commemorate last year's challenge. They can be viewed on Twitter here:
Looks like lots of fun right? We have come up with a few new ideas for this year's challenge, and are massively looking forward to some #socialmedia creativity.
We hope to see you all taking part come December 1st.