Along with gorging on festive food and watching TV, people spend much of the Christmas period simply lounging about at home, and that’s reflected in their use of the internet.
A look at Google Trends sheds light on what Brits were searching for on Christmas Day and Boxing Day, most of which can be broken up into a handful of categories. While some of it may seem trivial, it may offer you some inspiration for content and get you thinking about how you can piggyback on hot topics.
Television
Particularly on Christmas Day, Google users appear to have been tuned into their TVs. The Queen’s Christmas speech drew 7.4 million viewers and was the fifth most Googled topic, but just ahead of this in the Google stakes was the BBC’s showing of Mary Poppins Returns. Several other seasonal screenings made the top 20 for December 25, including EastEnders, It’s A Sin, Call the Midwife and the evergreen Christmas favourites Morecambe and Wise.
Depending on the type of business you run, you may be able to tweet or post along as you’re watching the most popular programmes. For example, a reference to Mary Poppins might work well if you offer childcare services, or if you have company-branded umbrellas.
Shopping and product info
Think Black Friday has led to the end of the traditional Boxing Day sales? Google Trends suggests otherwise, with “Boxing Day sales” being Christmas Day’s biggest search. It’s also notable that even though it was now too late for Christmas shopping, people were obviously searching for items they had received as gifts, with Nintendo Switch, AirPods, Apple Watch and iPhone 13 among the top searches.
Companies in the tech sector could anticipate this and consider what questions people are likely to have about their gifts. If a product release date or a big gift exchange date like Christmas is coming up, you could schedule a blog and social media post that addresses people’s likely questions, like “what are the iPhone 13’s best features?” or “how do AirPods work?”
Sports
Boxing Day is traditionally a big day on the sports calendar, and no fewer than six of the top 20 searches on December 26 were related to football, while cricket fans were tuned into England’s disappointing Ashes showing and the India v South Africa test match.
Sport is fast-moving, but it’s a topic that makes the internet and social media shake. We’ve written before about how you can use major tournaments like the UEFA European Championships to drive online engagement, and the same principles apply for any round of football fixtures like the ones seen on Boxing Day, even though Covid cases led to several postponements this time around.
Questions and answers
Notably, one of the biggest queries of Boxing Day was “Why is it called Boxing Day?” Adding to the intrigue of this question is that there’s no definitive answer. A popular theory is that it comes from the Victorian custom of the wealthy giving gifts in boxes to the poor. Some believe (wrongly, it seems) that it’s due to the day’s heavy sporting calendar, or because it’s the day people throw out all the boxes their presents came in (remember, cardboard should always be recycled!), while the explanation could be as boring as it being the day that “boxes off” the Christmas holiday.
Google’s snippets are increasingly trying to answer common questions by simply taking a section out of a reliable website and presenting it on the search results page, so have a think about blogs you could write and the questions you can answer through then. Make sure they are clear and concise enough for a search engine to understand.
Those are some ideas for how searches on a given date can shape engaging content. For ideas to keep you going throughout the year, why not join our Elite Digital Marketing Community on Facebook, or speak to Engage Web about our content development services?
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