5 Ways to Increase Social Engagement on Saint Patrick’s Day!

At Infinite Reach, we happen to love Saint Patrick’s Day! For starters, we share the same love of green! With that said, Saint Patrick’s Day also presents an opportune time of year for marketers to step outside the box and do something different to drive audience engagement during a well-loved and celebrated holiday!

Here’s a few examples of how to create engagement with your followers for Saint Patrick’s Day!

1. Use Real-time Marketing

Take Guinness for example. In 2011 Guinness worked with UK marketing firm, PSONA, to create a 4 day long social media plan to engage their audience and make Saint Patrick’s Day The Friendliest Day of the Year.

The goal was to create a campaign across Europe that brought people together to share a virtual glass of Guinness until they could actually share one in person on Saint Patrick’s Day.

To do this new technology was created to make the process possible, putting Guinness and PSONA at the top of the list winning several awards for innovation and creativity.

Here’s the video case study:

Guinness Facebook Campaign – Case Study from Geronimo London on Vimeo.

We know that a campaign like this involved a team and months of planning and was well executed with a sizable budget. Just look at the results—180,000 comments and although I didn’t see this come across my social platforms, this spread to more than 20 countries. Talk about huge engagement! Their budget wasn’t spent on FB social ads—but rather on the app development. Interesting case study, indeed!

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So you don’t have a large budget…and if you’re reading this you most likely didn’t plan ahead to use this holiday to find your pot of gold in social engagement. That’s okay, it’s not too late!

You can still use real-time marketing to do a photo contest on Instagram or Facebook asking your followers to post a photo of them celebrating the holiday with a chance to win a prize. Make it easy for them and if you have a fun prize worth winning your audience will engage!

2. Open Your Doors

It’s not too late to set up an impromptu Saint Patrick’s Day mini beer and corned beef fest and invite your clients and business partners over to your office for a fun get together before they head out to their favorite pub to celebrate.

Create a FB event with a stylized header and send out the invite. Then, create an email campaign and send out the invite and drive them to the event page to join. Don’t forget to make a few calls to personally invite those that you really want to attend.

Be sure to take photos and post them real-time to drive interest. You never know, a few more people might drop in making your little soiree the talk of the town!

3. I’m Feeling Lucky Campaign

I always feel lucky… I seem to have good parking and green light Karma although I don’t ever win the lottery. I guess there are trade-offs to everything! However, this is a perfect way to engage your audience on Saint Patrick’s Day!

Create a giveaway that goes with your brand or use a fun item such as an Irish themed t-shirt or necklace. Then create a Facebook header for your business that shouts “I have the Luck-of-the-Irish!” Ask users and followers to comment on the header image on why they have the Luck-of-the-Irish. For every comment, like and share they’ll receive 2 entries in the contest. Be sure to use the holiday hashtags to reach outside your current audience! #luckoftheirish #stpattys and then of course add your own company hashtag as well!

 4. Make it Personal with Company Themed Images

Take a current photo of what your business is and drop that into Photoshop. Then overlay a rainbow and use a catchy phrase like:

 “Temps are rising…do you feel lucky?

Clark’s Heating and Cooling is at the end of your rainbow!

Call us today!”

Thank you to Clark Heating and Cooling for use of this image!

5. Week of Luck Campaign

Sure, this year Saint Patrick’s Day lands on a Tuesday. That doesn’t mean you can’t share themed info all week! Find fun boards, trivia, games and day after themed photos to post. Take for instance the social meme at the top of this post. It was shared hundreds of times in social media last year. Again, don’t forget to reach outside your circle and find other followers by adding in those hashtags!

These are just a few of the many ways you can use Saint Patrick’s Day to drive social engagement. Hopefully, this post will help inspire you to feel the luck-of-the-Irish and jump on board on to create something worth growing your audience! Timing is everything—strike while the iron is hot!

Need more inspiration?? Check out this infographic for ideas! 

  Best of Luck on whatever you choose to do socially for Saint Patrick’s Day… and many Irish Blessings to you and your business!

  What other ideas do you have? Share with us!

  About Infinite Reach: 

To find out how we can help your business, please contact us at 602-535-2188 to schedule a no obligation consultation. Seriously, we love to meet  people and learn about your business!

Or.. just click here to send us an email! Or, if you know another business or marketing manager that would benefit from this post, please share it!  Then we’ll all be LUCKY! 🙂

#shamrock, #leprechaun, #Irish, #StPattys, #StPats #engagement.