If you're celebrating this great holiday with a single "Happy Thanksgiving" social media post, you’re missing quite a few social media holiday marketing opportunities. Instead, you need a more robust, multi-channel holiday marketing strategy that uses multiple posts to express gratitude and capture those special Thanksgiving moments to increase engagement.
Not only does Thanksgiving Day mark the official beginning of the festive season, but it's also a fantastic opportunity to spice things up before the most significant retail and eCommerce sales period: Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Having said this, please remember that this day shouldn't be about sales. At least, not in an obvious way.
Rather than offering discounts, focus your Thanksgiving marketing campaign on appreciating your loyal customers, rewarding them for their dedication, celebrating your fantastic team, being thankful for all your success and creative ideas, and laying the groundwork for upcoming time-limited offers.
Not sure how to get started? No worries, we got you. Below are 7 different social media post ideas you can use this Thanksgiving:
The success of your business depends upon your customers, especially those who have been loyal to you throughout. Thanksgiving Day is the perfect time to thank them for their loyalty and reward them with something special.
For example, you could offer an exclusive promotion or a complimentary gift with each purchase to encourage user-generated content.
Starbucks, a brand that’s struggling to regain market share under new leadership, went with a simple “Who are you thankful for?” post that’s naturally designed to encourage engagement. Focus on community building. Sticking to the basics often works well this time of year, and this is one of many examples of brands of every size doing exactly that.
If it’s relevant to your brand, an interactive recipe poll, or “feast or fail” challenge is a great way to encourage engagement and maybe even organically generate a viral moment. Get people commenting, competing, and sharing pictures of their own feasts and special dishes this time of year.
Everyone does Thanksgiving differently. Different traditions —whether across states or cities, or simply how one person or family does things, especially food — can be an interesting topic for debate.
Walmart capitalised on this, with this Instagram Reel designed to stir engagement and debate. This is an example of social media content management done well because it’s fun, lighthearted, and engaging.
UGC social media campaigns are a more effective, authentic way to build buzz around your brand this time of year, especially when you initiate a UGC challenge.
A UGC challenge could be anything that aligns with your brand, audience, current levels of engagement, budget, and resources. Ideas for the ideal Thanksgiving UGC campaign could include:
What if you’re a pet brand or have anything to do with people’s pets, like a veterinary clinic? An idea you can “steal” from Figo Pet Insurance is a UGC campaign with photos or videos “of [people’s] pets “stealing” Thanksgiving food.” The winner got a $50 gift card.
What could be more lovely, wholesome, and share-worthy than a UGC campaign involving pets, food, and laughter?!
Use your Thanksgiving post wisely. Instead of going for a quick engagement boost, create a holiday marketing campaign that will help you:
Organising a Thanksgiving giveaway or a photo contest featuring Thanksgiving images and leftovers is a great way to keep things fun while achieving your marketing goals. Instead of rewarding them with a free product, give the winners exclusive pre-sale access to Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals.
Short-form video, mainly for Instagram and TikTok, is a great way to quickly capture your audience's attention. Make them relatable. Make good use of your staff, especially those who are comfortable filming and being filmed.
Instagram Reels, Stories, and short videos for TikTok are great forms of social media content management that work really well any time of year.
You could ask your team, especially if you’re managing multiple locations, to film short videos about their social media traditions.
That way, people watching will relate to what you're posting. It will encourage more comments and sharing posts, resulting in more followers, traffic, and sales. Use tactics like trending audio and quick transitions to capture attention.
Something no brand can miss on their social media calendar at this time of year is a community donation drive or charitable campaign. Now is THE perfect time of year to show your company cares about the wider community or support a cause that’s important to your team or customers.
Pick a cause or charity that’s relevant or connected to your company in some way, like Habitat for Humanity and the Salvation Army.
Run a series of posts across all channels that encourage donations from your customers. If you can, pledge a percentage of revenue from a specific product or product range. This way, no one has to do anything special, other than buy something they already wanted.
Among many other retailers, Costco respects its employees' right to take a day off on Thanksgiving. After all, they are the ones who help in delivering the product and service to customers.
Every consumer business is competing for microseconds of customers' attention on social media. One way to stand out is with festive visuals and augmented reality (AR) filters for product posts.
With product posts, the aim is that a percentage of people who see them will buy the product or a related one. The more people who see it, the higher the percentage of those who will buy that product. Refocus from a simple "discount" (often following a generic template) to visual optimization with modern techniques like AR filters and high-quality graphics.
Ideas for how you can use these types of videos to gain more social media traction this time of year and appear more prominently in AI-powered SERPs include, but aren’t limited to the following:
Need some help with finding perfect images for your Thanksgiving and Black Friday campaigns? You can now access millions of free images and GIFs directly from Sendible.
Thanksgiving marketing ideas aren't worth much if you're not using the right hashtag strategy. Mixing viral hashtags (listed below) with niche ones that target a specific audience and explain the content will give your posts an extra boost.
[Bonus tip] If you want to use the power of meme posts, you might want to explore the #thanksgivingclapback hashtag on all social media platforms (especially on Twitter and TikTok).
Mix these holiday hashtags with seasonal and niched hashtags depending on the topic of your Thanksgiving Instagram post. You can include a unique campaign hashtag, branded, and some popular ones, such as #fallvibes, #novembermood, #detailsoftheday, to explain your post. You can optimise your strategy with our guide: How to Use Instagram Hashtags to Grow Your Business
Hashtags are one of the factors that have a significant impact on TikTok's algorithm, so make sure to mix these with other niched ones to target your audience. It would also be wise to use post-specific keywords in the description of your video. Learn more about best practices with our detailed guide to How to Use Hashtags on TikTok in Different Niches: 109 Industry Hashtags Included
Tailor your LinkedIn hashtag strategy to fit your and your audience's needs with our guide: How to Use Hashtags on LinkedIn to Grow Your Client Base: 85 Industry Hashtags Included. You will find an extensive list of niched hashtags that will help you target the audience that would benefit most from your Thanksgiving content.
Wondering if hashtags on Facebook work? Check out this handy guide: Should you use Hashtags on Facebook? Here's What you Need to Know.
Using Twitter for business can be overwhelming sometimes. Especially when creating holiday-themed Tweets. But this guide will help you get the most out of your hashtags: X Hashtags: A Guide to Finding and Using the Right Ones.
Sendible can help you save hours on planning Thanksgiving social media campaign, scheduling posts, managing and tracking them, and analysing performance to prove ROI.
You can use a plethora of features to better organise, produce, and manage your campaign:
There are many more features that can help you get the most out of 2025 Thanksgiving on social media. And the best news is that you're just in time to try them all for free, for 14 days! Get started today and watch how your social media ROI improves.
Thanksgiving is an excellent opportunity for you to connect (or reconnect) with your customers, partners, influencer, suppliers, and employees.
But, it's also a great intro to the period of gifting, discounts, and everything else that the holiday season has to offer.
Whether you decide to opt for a Thanksgiving promotion, photos of your audience's tables with pumpkin décor, short video recipes for delicious gravy that crowns the Thanksgiving meal, or a quote to express gratitude for having such a fantastic team - you need to think about your marketing goals, and how you'll use this boost in engagement, leads, sales to ensure the success of the upcoming Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas campaigns.
To help you hit those big KPIs, we have created this free campaign checklist to help you organise your Thanksgiving social media posts into a cohesive holiday season campaign. Check it out, and let us know in the comments if you need some more help.