It’s that time of year again. Are you ready? You might be thinking it’s too early, but it’s not. This is the time to be building your audience and making plans for the upcoming season. It’s important to grow your audience as much as you can before Thanksgiving. Or before; the entire week of Thanksgiving has become a sales week.

 It’s not too early to give customers a sneak peek at what you are offering for the season. If you so that, then you will be on their minds when they are putting together their lists. Here’s a statistic to think about: 500 million Instagram users are viewing Stories daily. How can you use that to your advantage? Instagram is introducing ads templates for Stories. This might be a new avenue to try for advertising.

Mark these dates on your calendar and prep your graphics now so that you are not doing them at the last minute. Think about if you want to add things like flash sales and internet-only specials to keep people looking at your page.

• Black Friday – November 29th
• Shop Local Saturday – November 30th
• Cyber Monday – December 2nd

Lastly, Facebook is predicting some trends for this season.  The first is that shoppers will be making larger purchases earlier this year. Another one is that shoppers want more pleasurable buying experiences. They are also seeing more people using Stories for “window” shopping. Finally, they are predicting that brick-and-mortar sales will strengthen this season. People want to be able to see and touch what they are buying. Plus, they want that personal shopping that you can’t get online.