We know you’re desperate to put your out of office on, but there are 4 tasks that need to be on your to-do list before you wave goodbye to work and hello to some time off. As ever, if you need help, we’re here.
1. Change your hours throughout your online presence.
Not changing your hours often leads to lost sales, and mistrust because of a poor customer experience. Customers are more likely to visit your shop / call you if your hours are stated.
- Google Business Profile – you can set temporary holiday hours – click here to learn how.
- Facebook – Facebook has yet to allow users to set up holiday hours independent of their regular hours. Still, it’s not a difficult process. Here’s how:
1. Click About on the left side of your page
2. Click Edit Page Info
3. Click the Hours tab at the top
4. Add your hours and click Save Changes
- Instagram – write a post, but also put your times / days open on the image, so if customers are looking to see if you are open on Insta, they can easily find out. Have a post ready, for when your normal office hours resume.
- Other social channels – make a TikTok, create a LinkedIn post – just make sure that your bases are covered on all of your channels
- Your website.
2. Set up auto-reply responses on social media.
For Facebook, Insta and TikTok, use the auto-response tool to let people know if you won’t be answering their messages immediately – and give them the expectation of when you will get back to them.
This is a great chance to show your brand’s personality, eg:
“Thanks for your message. We’re currently on a break. Not a Ross <-> Rachel break, more of a ‘Wow, it’s been quite a year, we need to watch ALL of the Home Alone series followed by Die Hard whilst nose bagging chocolate kind of break.’ We’ll get back to you on the 5th of January.”
3. Check any social media posts that you have scheduled.
Did you write something a while ago and schedule it? Just check in on your content. If there is a crisis, could it be deemed insensitive?
Why not send yourself a diary reminder to check in on your posts just before they are due to go out. Risk-averse, yes – but we remember back to 2013 when Tesco had to pull its Value burgers off the shelves as food investigators found horse meat in some burgers. So… no one had checked the upcoming Tweet which contained the phrase ‘hit the hay’ ?.
4. Write a really good ‘out of office email’
How boring is the regular out-of-office email hmm? Why not use this time of year and THIS out of office occurrence to show personality and culture, and inject a little fun into your response.
We loved ours from last year and are already brainstorming how to top it! See below….
Thank you for your email – we’re currently out of the office.
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We asked ChatGPT4.0 to imagine our Out of Office message this year, with an image. You can see our basic prompt below the image.
See if you can spot the (minimum 3) obvious mistakes – and the look of terror on the gingerbread, bottom right!.
As the sign says, for urgent matters (running out of cheese is not an urgent matter) text 0424 397 207.
See you next year!
