How to build Black Friday marketing hype with organic social media content
- Dave Endsor
- Sep 22
- 11 min read
Updated: Sep 29
Black Friday 2025 is less than two months away and I know from experience that teams will be prepping hard for the big day.
I say 'day'...
I won't be the only one who's noticed Black Friday sales seem to start earlier and earlier in November each year.
This links to one of the big challenges marketing teams face when promoting it. You need to balance building enough hype in advance so customers are aware of the discounts on offer, while not promoting it too early that you lose sales in the run-up.
As complicated as that sentence sounds, that's because it is!
You don't want to stop customers making purchases they were going to make anyway, just because they know some discounts will be available in the future.
That caveat aside, I wanted to share my thoughts on the role that social media has in Black Friday marketing, based on the social campaigns I managed during my time leading the digital marketing efforts at Blue Light Card – one of the UK's leading discount services.
What role did social media play during Black Friday marketing at Blue Light Card?
Black Friday was Blue Light Card's busiest time of year – with the highest targets and the biggest amount of pressure to get it right. As a discount service with millions of members, it was hardly going to be quiet!
But, it was also a collective effort across every single department, each with their own role to play.
My responsibility was to lead the social media output before and during the Black Friday event, with two main goals:
Attract new members through paid advertising.
Use organic social to build a huge buzz and raise awareness of the brands who would be offering increased discounts.
We had to do all of that while knowing that many discounts were often finalised very close to the day itself. This occasionally brought its own challenges when it came to our content ideas and some were sadly shelved late on.
It's all part of the process!
(As the years went on, we as a business had a stronger position to request that discounts were finalised well in advance – this was a relief for everyone.)
The member acquisition process was quite straight forward as I worked with our digital agency to ensure the most appropriate and best-performing Black Friday ads were running as close as possible to the launch. This was to raise awareness to those in our audience who weren't members, giving them the chance to sign up and get their Blue Light Card with time to spare. Of course, the activation and management required the genius of paid media minds – I oversaw and advised on visuals and messaging, but left them to the activation. (I've always been more of a strategy and content person, than an ads bod).
It was in the organic social efforts where me and the team really got stuck in.
Here's how you can do the same, and these eight tips are all the things I think you need to consider when running your own Black Friday social media campaign.
Define your Black Friday organic social media goals and KPIs
A good social media strategy – for a campaign or a brand – needs to have clearly defined goals and objectives. Ideally these should ladder up and link to wider marketing objectives anyway, but if it's part of a campaign then there needs to be a logical connection to those goals as well.
At Blue Light Card, the campaign goals for Black Friday were always focused on logins, offer clicks and affiliate commission – broken down by each of the four days that the event typically ran for (Friday to Monday inclusive). There were others, but these were the headline stats that would draw the main focus.
From a social media point of view, as the primary goal was buzz and awareness, we were interested in reach and impressions. We wanted as many of our followers to see our content as possible, but this meant creating content worthy of their eyeballs and engagement.
However, you don't earn commission with impressions so we needed to balance that content with activity that would also drive as many clicks as possible. Which as any social professional knows, is a challenge!
You will need to report on these KPIs at the end of the campaign (see point seven), but do monitor them throughout to ensure you're on track.
Pro tip: define your organic social objectives in the context of wider marketing and business goals. Make them relevant! Then get your team and other departments on-board as soon as possible. This will help you avoid too many last changes. Although, and please make a note of this(!) last minute changes will definitely happen.
Kick your social content into shape
Over the years, we became super adept at knowing what content would and wouldn't work around Black Friday, but our goal always remained the same – building as much buzz organically as possible.
Our goal, and that of the wider business, was to help our members save money. Therefore the primary focus is always the offers and discounts they can access – however these types of posts don't always perform as well as you would think on social.
We needed to mix it up with engagement content.
Right from the beginning of November were building that buzz. We'd post several times a week early on, before ramping that up the closer we got to Black Friday. This content included general teasers and announcements, questions around our members' best ever Black Friday savings, exclusive competitions and teasers for them, plus user-generated content (that we planned and instigated), as well – of course – launch and last chance announcements.
It was a lot!
We also had to balance our own plans with the requirements of other teams. Specifically, our partnerships colleagues who were negotiating the offers with some of the world's biggest brands – where the request for space on social was often baked into the deal.
This gave us the foundation for discount and offer content, however these posts weren't always the best performing from a social media metrics point of view, so we knew had to mix that in with social-first content that would attract likes, comments and shares to create that buzz.
I think we managed it!
Don't forget to refer back to your content pillars so your content is relevant. And remind yourself that what works at other times of the year, might also work during Black Friday. It's always worth cross-referencing with other campaigns and previous activity for inspiration.
Pro tip: Mix up your content so you're not just focused on engagement or sales messages. There needs to be a balance – one that will help you hit your social targets, but also lines up to the wider goals of the business.
Create a seamlessly flowing content calendar
Just as critical as knowing what content would work, is knowing the order in which to release it. For instance, you can't talk about specific offers if you haven't set the scene on how your Black Friday event is going to work and, more importantly, how your customers (or members in Blue Light Card's case) can access it all.
That's why your content calendar needs to flow in a logical and organised order that kicks off with broad relevance – so it appeals to as many of your social media-following customers as possible – before narrowing down its focus the closer you get to Black Friday itself. As I mentioned, our social plan always started at the very beginning of November.
All of this meant I spent a lot of time defining the structure of the content plan ahead of time and presenting it to other departments well in advance for suggestions and feedback. I knew it was 95% complete but you always need to allow for tweaks and changes, so it's worth checking.
Critically, I also needed buy-in and you don't get that without involving other departments.
Like any campaign, the better and earlier that you plan, the better your output.
Pro tip: I found working backwards to be quite effective. I knew there would be a heavily skewed number of promotional content on the days of the Black Friday event, and also I knew our promotional efforts started at the beginning of November. I used these as bookends so I could then work out the middle... the engagement content, planned reactive, teasers and more.
Give your audience moments of surprise and delight
Surprise and delight played a major role in our marketing at Blue Light Card. We would run huge campaigns to give our members the chance to win treats and gifts – whether it was to ask them to nominate their teams, provide giveaways at events or just say an unprompted thank you for their incredible efforts at work.
From a social media perspective, competitions were a huge part of this activity. Every year we would run upwards of 60 competitions exclusively on our social channels, generating thousands of engagements and millions of impressions. The annual prize value for all of these competitions was often £50,000+ combined, and they were genuinely incredible prizes.
(Think: Ninja air fryers, Samsung TVs, VIP theme park trips... and so much more.)
My social media manager at the time did an unbelievable job of coordinating all of it. Shout out to her!
For Black Friday, this was no different. We would work closely with the partnerships department to secure prizes and gifts from the brands who were also providing increased discounts during the event.
This had two major benefits:
It would offer our members the chance to win a number of fantastic prizes.
It would increase awareness of that particular brand ahead of Black Friday.
As you can see from those prizes I listed above, these weren't cheap and cheerful £10 vouchers either. We had pretty strict rules on the minimum prize value we wanted from our partner brands.
These were major prizes you absolutely would want to win! (And I really did, even though Blue Light Card employees were banned from entering due to our T&Cs, and rightly so... sadly!)
The added benefit of running the competitions was that they generated clickthroughs to the offer pages for the brand featured in post. So, if were giving a Ninja air fryer, we would also link to the Ninja offer on the Blue Light Card website. This would often result in thousands of clicks.
Pro tip: Unless you are exclusively a competition-adjacent brand, your social channels shouldn't just post giveaways. However, if surprise and delight is one of marketing tactics, then go big! These will help you to make a dent in your targets, but also generate a buzz around a particular campaign, such as Black Friday.
Pre-empt and encourage reactive and user-generated content
Many brands are incredibly lucky in the amount of organically generated user-generated content that comes their way.
One way to encourage more is to ask for it. Your audience will share their savings if prompted... but you do have to ask!
To keep the buzz going over the Black Friday event itself, and to give me and the team more content to work with, we would always encourage our members to share their savings.
This was posted in the afternoon of Black Friday (once all the promotional content had gone live):
The comments were a goldmine of content, and we then turned these into our own simple, but effective posts.
It's there that we discovered members who'd bought sought-after Christmas presents for their kids or savings on new home tech. Plus some home essentials that no one really wants to buy but we all have to at some point:
If you know your audience well enough, you know what they'll respond to.
We knew that by asking them to share their savings many would.
There would be the odd moan about the overall concept of Black Friday being commercial and many would boycott it but, to be honest, the numbers of people logging in and saving during the event always suggested otherwise.
Pro tip: Whatever format you can get it – text, image, video – never underestimate how important UGC is to your content plan. Remember – you don't have to wait for it to appear out of the blue, you can ask for it.
Anticipate social media dramas (even if they don't start on social)
If something goes wrong, in any business, customers turn to social to complain.
This means any social media professional needs some pretty robust armour to not let it affect them.
Our small but mighty social team worked super closely with our member services department (that's customer services for everyone else) on an almost daily basis. We had dedicated member services personnel in the DMs on a daily basis – responding to our members and helping them resolve any issues.
This is vital when you have an organisation and member base the size of Blue Light Card's.
So when we wanted to anticipate the potential problems that might pop up on Black Friday, we turned to member services to find out what happened before. We could then prepare answers that would inform FAQs in our launch comms, but also have them ready in anticipation of them happening again.
Mostly, these issues were around user error or some things running slightly slowly because of the sheer volume of users. Either way, you have to be prepared.
Pro tip: Any big campaign is a team effort, but I think many businesses overlook the wealth of knowledge and insight on offer in their customer service departments. They need to be involved from the beginning! All of this effort and collaboration pays off at the busiest times of the year, like Black Friday. And, as customers love to use social to vent their frustrations, you as the social team need to work really closely with your customer service teams.
Remember to 'win' and analyse for next time
Something I talk a lot about when coaching social media and marketing managers is remembering to 'win'. This is the idea that no matter what happens, you should be able to look back on your work with pride.
If the campaign is a success then of course that's even better. If it fails, then it's a chance to learn for next time.
Marketers are massively guilty of moving from campaign to campaign and project to project without taking a moment to pause and reflect on the one that's just finished. We should be able to feel proud of our efforts, particularly during the busiest times of the year.
At the same time, you do have to contend with business matters. This means building your social media campaign report and presenting the overall results, showcasing what worked, as well as spotting areas for improvement next time.
Make sure it links back to the KPIs you set at the beginning, and report honestly and openly about all social performance.
For us, my final Black Friday saw a record number of impressions and a record month for that financial year too. It was just ahead of July where we ran our own version of Black Friday in the summer, called the Big Blue Weekend.
Pro tip: Reporting on social is a skill. Share the right amount of data and insight with the appropriate people. The more senior leaders may only want a top-level snapshot, but it's always worth asking in advance what information they'd like to see – before the time comes to build your report.
Don't neglect the rest of your content calendar!
With all of this going on, and with a stacked social media content calendar, you might think that Black Friday is your sole focus for the month.
Unlikely!
It's absolutely vital that you don't neglect the rest of the social media content calendar. No month is going to focus on just one topic.
At Blue Light Card, November was a particularly busy month on social. We would regularly attend events where we'd meet members – such as Nursing Live – but also there was the matter of Remembrance Weekend. The latter is a huge moment for Blue Light Card's audience, particularly due to the hundreds of thousands of members who are serving and ex-Forces personnel.
Dates like 11th November really matter, and the audience – rightly so – expects them to be acknowledged.
This is why your initial planning should include and consider other vital content that will be posted around the wider Black Friday campaign.
Plus, once Black Friday was out the way, attention very quickly turned to the C word... 🎄🎅🏻
Pro tip: Look at old content calendars for an understanding of what went out on social in previous years. While some events like Remembrance Day will stand out, there may have been ad hoc or reactive content from that month that should now be considered as a permanent fixture in your calendar.
