FREE support for local businesses and Harrogate Christmas Market traders
The ninth Harrogate Christmas Market was due to begin next Thursday on 12 November 2020. Instead we all find ourselves locked down again for the next four weeks.
The Harrogate Christmas Market was created in 2012 to support retail and hospitality businesses in Harrogate by increasing footfall during November, when it was a little quieter before the traditional Christmas rush. Since 2012 we think that aim has been achieved, in addition £80,000 of surplus profits has been shared between several local community charities.
As the second lockdown continues over the next four weeks, we will step up sharing social media posts, not only for our Virtual Harrogate Christmas Market Traders, who are listed on the website, but also for the Harrogate businesses struggling to keep trading at this difficult time. This will continue up until the end of the year.
If you are able to do so, over the next four weeks in particular, please support these Traders in buying your Christmas presents from them – or ordering a takeaway – most are selling online, offering delivery or click and collect services.
We have already been sharing posts for the last couple of months, and have had positive feedback from several businesses who have found their reach and followers have increased after we shared their posts – we have seen some posts go from a reach of 150 to over 1,500 in a matter of minutes.
However, it can be difficult to find all relevant businesses, so we are asking businesses to tag us on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter and we will share their posts to more than 14,000 potential customers across all three platforms.
This is a FREE service, even for the market traders, who have not been charged to be included in our online Virtual Harrogate Christmas Market.
If everyone helps each other we can all get through this together.
Below is a summary of how the post sharing will work:
Facebook Page – facebook.com/harrogatechristmasmarket
We have almost 11,000 followers and shares on here usually get a great response. However, you MUST TAG US IN YOUR POST/PHOTO to enable us to see you and be able to share your post! Although we’ve liked some pages, they are not easily visible to us to share. Posts of yours we share on here can reach thousands of potential customers. (Note: this doesn’t work if you don’t have a Facebook Page, we can’t share private individual’s posts on Facebook.)
Instagram – instagram.com/hgchristmasmarket
The simplest way for us to share your Instagram posts is to share in our Instagram Stories, which are also shared in our Facebook Stories. These are only visible for 24 hours but regularly reach over 100 users. We also have Highlights including Harrogate Shopping, Christmas Shopping and now ‘Harrogate Takeaways’. The Highlights remain until we update the selected posts, which are switched around regularly to avoid there being too many in there at once.
Again – PLEASE TAG US IN YOUR POST/PHOTO if you post and particularly want us to share it. As Christmas approaches there may be too many to share every single one, but we will try!
Twitter – twitter.com/hgchristmasmkt
We will endeavour to share your tweets by Re-tweeting to our 3,000+ followers. In addition we have Twitter Lists of Traders, Harrogate Shops, Harrogate Restaurants and Bars as well as ‘Stay and Play’ for Hotels and Tourist attractions. You can follow one or more of these lists to bring their posts into your feed and help fellow businesses by sharing their posts too.
As above, PLEASE TAG US @HGChristmasMkt in order to bring a post to our attention if you’d particularly like us to share it.