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. 

#2 Run an interactive recipe poll or 'feast or fail' challenge

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. 

#3 Use a user-generated content (UGC) challenge to build buzz

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:

• A creative and visually stunning table setup;
• A leftover recipe challenge;
• Holiday traditions videos (including Shorts, Reels, TikTok’s)
• DIY and craft showcase, including decorating homes and front doors/windows.

How to Collect and Share User-Generated Content on Social Media

Read the guide

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?! 

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:

• Campaigns: You no longer have to manually manage your social media marketing campaigns across all your channels. This helpful feature allows you to organise your social media posts into cohesive campaigns, ensuring that your messaging is consistent across every platform. Additionally, you can delve into detailed campaign-level analytics to gain insights that will elevate your strategy to the next level.
• Team Collaboration: Use our collaboration tools to easily approve posts before scheduling, monitor and respond to incoming direct messages and comments, and delegate messages such as sales opportunities and support issues to improve campaign performance.
• Bulk Import: Seamlessly upload and schedule Thanksgiving campaign weeks or months in advance with our bulk scheduler, ensuring efficiency and productivity. This feature also allows you to ask for approvals for your social media posts in bulk.
• Content Library: With a massive volume of assets that should be posted to multiple platforms in multiple locations, content management can easily become chaotic during the Thanksgiving period. Enter the Content Library feature. This feature allows you to line up content for future purposes, craft and save content whenever inspiration strikes, index your content with tags for better organisation, store campaign hashtags for easy access, bulk import content to the library, and oh so much more.
• AI Assist: Sendible's AI tool acts as your virtual sidekick. In seconds, it generates content ideas and captions for each social media channel and optimises your existing content. This way you won't need to worry about creativity blocks when you already have too much on your marketing mind.
• Custom Tags: Sendible can help you customise content in bulk in just a few seconds by adding prefilled, brand-specific specs like URL, phone number, text, hashtags, and more, unique to your audience or location-specific brands. This handy feature will help you ensure everything is on-brand during this hectic period.
• Reports Hub: Our social media management tool has advanced reporting tools you'll love. You can create custom, branded reports with numerous modules, automate reports to eliminate the need for manually sending them out or missing deadlines, or even get a snapshot of how your social media channels are doing without having to dive into the reporting of each social platform with our One Click report.

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.

[Bonus] Free social media campaign checklist

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.