The time to be creative doesn’t have to end with Christmas and New Year countdowns. The beginning of a new year is the next best opportunity to engage your audience, tap into their heightened emotions, and drive sales.
We’ve put together ten exciting New Year campaign ideas to continue the holiday cheer and help you create a delightful experience for your buyers. Let’s get into it!
10 Social Media Campaign Ideas for the New Year
New routines, vision boards, habit trackers, and more—the start of the year is filled with new promises.
People are excited to buy things that help them become more productive and achieve their goals. You can tap into this psychological state to create a high-decibel New Year campaign.
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Host a New Year giveaway.
Giveaways = higher engagement and more followers.
A New Year giveaway campaign is a great way to build momentum and gain visibility across social media platforms. A good campaign can create virality for your brand and generate buzz.
To host an effective giveaway campaign, you need:
- Appealing rewards and prizes
- Clear instructions for entry and participation
- A good giveaway platform to manage the campaign
You can also collaborate with niche influencers to broaden the campaign’s reach and maximize participation.
Remember to post reminders actively to ensure your contest doesn’t peter out and people keep joining.
Here’s a great example of a holiday and New Year giveaway by Fourthwall hosted on X.
They’re giving away the coveted Stream Deck and have listed two clear criteria for entering the contest.
💡 Pro Tip: You can also spread the word about this giveaway on your website by embedding a form on a landing page. Use POWR to embed a contest entry form on your site and get more traction for your giveaway.
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Share meaningful tips and hacks.
Another classic social media campaign for the New Year is sharing tips, tricks, and templates for 2024.
You can curate a set of tips for specific themes and use cases that are relevant to your audience’s needs.
The key to these campaigns is presenting genuinely helpful advice.
You don’t want to share generic or overused tips that everyone already knows. Instead, speak to experts and collect hands-on insights to make every post actionable.
For example, Canva posted a set of templates users can leverage for different use cases in 2024. They posted several short reels on various themes to share tried-and-tested tips for their target users.
Here are a few steps to create a similar campaign and share meaningful tips:
- Start by identifying your key user personas and define what matters the most to them—their goals, motivations, and buying behaviors.
- List the most crucial use cases relevant to each persona and your business. Essentially, you have to find problems you can help users with.
- Consult subject matter experts for each use case and create tips + templates that center around your product/service.
You can create this content in various formats, like reels, YouTube videos, carousels, textual posts, etc.
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Promote limited-time and limited-edition offers.
Limited-time offers create urgency among buyers. They produce an impulse to buy something before the discounted price goes away.
On the other hand, limited-edition offers to tap into the fear of missing out (FOMO), urging buyers to snag a deal before it sells out forever.
Both these psychological selling tactics work well during the New Year festivities. You can incentivize people to purchase something right away instead of tabling the decision for later. Quick action > lengthy consideration.
All you need to do is emphasize the time limit and create exclusivity around your offer—a never-seen-before deal only for the New Year!
Here’s a great example by UNIQLO. The brand collaborated with Marimekko to launch a limited-edition collection and created a teaser video to create buzz around the campaign.
Write a snappy copy or create a compelling video to get more eyeballs for your campaign and convert the social media interest into sales.
You can pick elements from your sales pitch to talk about specific pain points and paint a before-after picture.
To further improve video engagement, consider incorporating interactive elements, such as polls or quizzes, within your video content.
Particularly on social media platforms that encourage viewer participation and amplify the excitement around your campaign.
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Review your wins from last year.
Another exciting idea to engage your audience and win new followers at the start of the year is to wrap up your top highlights from last year.
Sharing a round-up of your biggest achievements and progress points from last year can:
- Build a stronger connection with your audience
- Reinforce your brand’s credibility in the industry
You can use this campaign to tell people about everything you achieved in the past year and share your aspirations or goals for the year ahead.
Start by compiling a list of milestones, including:
- New launches
- Growth metrics
- New hires and promotions
- Company announcements
- Awards and media coverage
Once you’ve collected all the details, you can create an exciting narrative to present your growth curve.
Whether through a short video, a carousel, or a textual post, you can write engaging copy to increase engagement in this retrospective post.
Here’s an excellent example of a yearly wrapped post by Floik. They created a short video showing their top wins and user participation throughout the year.
Source: Floik
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Plan interactive contests.
Every social media platform now gives you tools to interact with your audience actively. You can create interactive contests to add a fun twist to your social presence and encourage user participation.
Here are some examples of interactive contests you can host for your audience:
- This vs. that competition: Make a list of relevant ideas or activities for your users and pit these ideas in a head-to-head competition, asking them to vote for which one they prefer. You can use polls to ask people about their preferred activity.
- User-generated content: Create a hashtag or theme on different platforms and encourage users to share their content in any format.
- Exclusive discounts: Host a live stream with a quiz or a Q&A story asking a few questions. Users who have all the correct answers can win exclusive discounts.
These interactive contests can increase engagement among your audience and give your socials an extra boost around the new year.
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Do special countdown live streams.
Live streams are a uniquely engaging method to catch up with your audience in real-time. You can conduct one live stream or host several different streams counting down to the new year.
Use these live sessions to interact with your followers and answer their questions or concerns. You can respond to their comments while on the stream or collect questions beforehand to make the session more topic-oriented.
Another great way to make these countdown live streams more meaningful is by giving a glimpse of things you have in store for your users.
Give a sneak peek into a new product or feature you’ll launch soon. Or hint at how your business will evolve in the coming days.
The goal is to give users something to look forward to while you welcome the new year.
But if you don’t have the resources to host a live stream, you can create designs to post a few days before and after the New Year.
Use a social media scheduling tool to keep all your posts in order and publish them automatically on the designated date.
For example, Grammarly posted this post as a part of its countdown campaign for the New Year.
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Create custom New Year visuals.
A fairly easy New Year campaign idea for social media is to create custom brand visuals. You can work with an illustrator to create something unique or get a designer to make creative graphics.
While pictures of fireworks, champagne, and sunrise are pretty common, you should go for a unique design aligned with your brand identity.
For example, Notion created this simple graphic with SMS texts from their founder wishing everyone a happy new year.
This design follows Notion’s color palette and illustration style, presenting an impressive design.
You can also email these custom graphics to promote your Shopify store or brand website and deliver a personalized message to your subscribers.
Custom graphics don’t have to be a single-image post. You can also create GIFs, reels, and TikToks to make your brand stand out during the new year.
Just remember—make your brand shine!
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Share your company’s resolutions.
We all make resolutions at the start of a new year—even if we break them by the end of week 1. You can add your spin to this ritual and share your company’s resolutions with your audience.
Some of these resolutions can be business-oriented, the ones you don’t mind sharing with the world. Some others can be quirky and funny, meant to make people giggle.
A good balance of serious and funny resolutions can make your campaign a hit!
The cool thing is you can share these resolutions through a simple textual post—like this CEO—or create a fun video to walk people through your goals.
The idea is to create some public accountability while also keeping things lightweight. Once you’ve posted these resolutions, use the post to send connection requests and initiate a conversation with prospective customers.
Keep LinkedIn’s limitations in mind when sending out these connection requests, and make the most of your campaign.
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Give a sneak peek of your holidays.
What better way to launch a New Year campaign than by spotlighting your team on social media?
You can humanize your brand and earn people’s trust by sharing behind-the-scenes content from people’s holiday plans.
If you hosted a team lunch or dinner party, post pictures of the event to bring a human element to your brand.
This campaign would help in community-building since your employees would be eager to engage and reshare posts like these.
Keep the tone of these posts light and breezy, inviting followers to share their holiday experiences.
Scurri, for example, shared this LinkedIn post with photos from the team get-together they hosted.
The brand also took it as an opportunity to invite people to apply for multiple roles in the company—a win-win!
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Curate your top industry predictions.
At the start of a new year, people are always looking for upcoming trends to follow and predictions of what’s coming. They want to know how the industry will change and what’s happening this year.
It is an excellent opportunity to share exciting predictions and trends for the year. It’ll help build thought leadership for your brand while starting conversations in the community.
You can create a carousel mentioning all the key trends you expect to see in the new year. Here’s a great example by Semrush:
Alternatively, you can host webinars or fireside chats with a panel of experts to discuss how the industry will evolve and grow in the coming year.
Then, break down this longer content into small video snippets and share them across different platforms.
This New Year, stand out with your brand on social media!
That’s a wrap on our ten best ideas for New Year campaigns on social media. Now, it’s your turn to be creative and give your audience something refreshing!
Remember, New Year is when social feeds are cluttered with posts. But you can cut through this noise and amplify your brand with a unique campaign. So, get started today!
Author Bio
Eduard Klein is an international digital growth marketer, blogger, and entrepreneur with a global mindset.
He is the founder of RocketGrowth and guides us through starting and growing a digital business and riding the wave of digital technology and marketing without getting swept away.
