Summertime means fun in the sun, vacations, beach days and adventures! The kids are out of school and the weather is too nice to keep them inside! The majority of people highly anticipate this summertime R&R and for businesses in the categories of swimwear, outdoor equipment, sunglasses, restaurants and “fun in the sun” outings, they thrive. But what about the rest of the businesses? If you’re not one of those summertime-fun businesses, you might notice what we call the “Summer Social Lag”, where engagement on your company’s social media pages is low.

First, let us start by saying that it’s not your fault. People, businessmen and women included, are probably just taking a breather and enjoying their vacations and family time –– but that’s why when summer hits, it’s time to switch up your social media strategies. If you can’t beat ‘em (summer), join ‘em!

Four tips to help your business overcome this “Summer Social Lag” and continue engaging with potential customers and clients.

1. Humanize and show off employees. Summertime is a great opportunity to showcase that your company knows how to have fun too! Have employees send in fun pictures of themselves on vacation! You might be thinking, “How is this going to increase sales?” That’s not the point of THIS post. (In fact, only 20% of your business’s social media content needs to be hard sales content.) The point of posting content like this is to connect with clients and potential customers on a more “human” level. Users who are on vacation/summer mode are way more likely to engage in a fun summer vacation post rather than a product post. To get engagement on the post, you can caption it, “John Doe, our account coordinator, is at [location]. Where have you been or where are you going this summer?”
2. Run a contest or do a giveaway! This one’s pretty much foolproof and is always a success. It literally makes people have to engage with your posts and pages in order to win. You can have fun with this one and the sky’s the limit! But if you’re short on ideas on how to run it, we got you!. When posting your giveaway/contest, tell your audience to like/follow and tag 3 friends in the comments. Each additional tag AFTER 3 is an additional entry! No limit on entries.b. Take a funny behind-the-scenes picture and have a caption contest. Best caption wins!. Post a picture of an employee on either a work trip or on vacation (with a semi recognizable landmark) and have your audience guess the location!
3. Promote future products and upcoming events and company news. You can even take it a step further in a super fun way that lets your audience have a small say-so. Ask your audience to share their opinions on things such as upcoming event locations, what colors they want to see on an upcoming product, theme ideas for the next event, etc. Allowing your audience to have a say in things such as these is great because it makes them feel connected, invested and gives them something to look forward to! 
4. This last one is a circumstantial one but it’s awesome! Respond creatively to a noncontroversial breaking story. Our favorite example of this is when Oreos did a live tweet when the lights went out in the New Orleans Superdome during the Ravens vs. 49ers Super Bowl game in 2013. It was retweeted more than 16,000 times and it went down as one of the most memorable moments! Talk about engagement!

There are so many more ways to engage with your audience than listed above. This is just the tip of the iceberg but hopefully, this helps sparks ideas! Get creative! Summer is a fun season so have fun with it! Just remember, most of your light-hearted summer content will be consumed on mobile devices so be sure to optimize your content accordingly and share your content in “bite-size” pieces so it’s not too much for users while they’re on vacation/summer mode. One last thing that we also recommend doing is holding off on any big announcements until late August or September (when everyone is getting back to business mode!) 

And on that note, if you’re on the hunt for someone to take your company’s social media to the next level, we would love the opportunity to be able to do that!

Contact us today to get started!