Celebrate holidays with your community by sharing holiday-themed photos and videos, and learn how to plan for holiday content on Instagram.

Creating a content calendar before a holiday can help prepare your business for a busy season, regardless of which holiday you are preparing for. Create your holiday content calendar with these 4 steps.

Find photos and videos other businesses have shared around a previous year’s holiday. Don’t forget you can save posts you like.

Look at upticks in sales from previous years to see when your audience starts their holiday shopping.

Create a list of photos and videos you want to use to celebrate the holiday. Compose captions ahead of time so you have them ready when you post the photo or video.

See the sample content calendar below on what a restaurant might post just a few days before a holiday. Download a PDF version of a content calendar you can use here.

Go through the content calendar you just created and think of places where you can match the holiday colors with your business’s existing look and feel.

If you’re thinking about the types of photos and videos you can create for your holiday content calendar, try one or more of these types of posts to celebrate the holiday with your community.

Share photos and videos of your team celebrating the holiday to take them behind-the-scenes, like your office holiday party or any specific holiday-themed events.

You can incorporate decorations, colors, or other symbols from the holiday.

Offer a discount.

Incentivize your community to shop during the holiday season by offering a limited-time discount. Provide an exclusive discount code in your stories and prompt your customers to use it before it disappears in 24 hours.

Organize a giveaway.

Show appreciation for your community during the holiday season by gifting your products to your customers. Ask your customers to comment on a specific post and pick a random winner to receive one of your products from the comments.

As people are doing their holiday shopping, help them find gifts by placing your products front and center. Create an immersive storefront for people to explore your most popular products with Instagram Shopping. 130 million accounts tap on shopping posts to learn more about products every month¹.

Find a step-by-step guide on how to set up Instagram Shopping for your Business Account here.

Here are 6 ways you can help people to find and buy gifts with Instagram Shopping:

Feature products that make great gifts or decorations for the holiday.

Tag those products on your posts and stories, so people can tap to learn the name and the price of the product. Learn how to set up Instagram Shopping here.

Create gift guides for different budgets or needs.

You can create a carousel post that features products for certain budgets or create a story that shows products for specific needs. Learn how to share multiple photos and videos in just one post here.

In a recent survey commissioned by Facebook Inc., 62% of respondents surveyed said they have become more interested in a brand or product after seeing it in stories². Showcase your products front and center on stories and tag your products when you do. Learn how to tag your products in your stories here.

They can create a feed post or post to their stories. If they tag you in the story, you can repost their stories and spread the cheer that your products bring.

If you have a physical store that you’ve decorated for a holiday, record a video and share it on your story to encourage local customers to do their holiday shopping in person.

People can save posts with products that they like, so they can remember them. They can even create a personal Wish List by tapping

on a feed post with merchants who have set up Instagram Shopping. Learn more about how Wish List works here.

Start planning as early as you can, so you can launch before the holiday season and be top of shoppers’ minds when they start shopping for the holiday. You can even incorporate it into your holiday content calendar if you have specific photos or videos you want to turn into an ad.

Having a SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound) goal will help you narrow down specifically what you want to accomplish when you’re creating your paid promotion. Keep in mind you can send people to your profile, website, or even into your Direct Messages when they tap your ad. Here are a few examples of SMART goals:

• Reach new shoppers: Reach new shoppers with a 5% increase in followers on your profile for two weeks before the holiday

• Drive product views: Drive increased visits to your website by 10% for a month before the holiday

See which one of your holiday-themed photos or videos has performed well with your Insights and promote it to reach more holiday shoppers. Learn more about promoting your posts here, and to promote your stories here.

When you turn your post into a promotion by tapping Promote, it will automatically target people like your followers with the Automatic Audience option. The Automatic Audience option are people with similar interests and demographics, in similar locations, to your current followers. However, if you want to target a specific group of shoppers during the holiday, you can create your own audience before you set your ad live by choosing which locations, genders, age, and interests to target.

Think about how long you want your promotion to run before and during the holiday season for duration, and select a budget that allows you to reach your goals within that time period and that you feel comfortable with.

Keep an eye on your promotions to see how they are performing against your goals. After the holiday is over, evaluate the performance of your promotion and incorporate these learnings into next year’s holiday promotion. Learn how to view your promotion insights.