7 Chinese New Year Social Media Post Ideas + Design Tips
Holiday marketing is a goldmine for generating leads, sales, and just overall brand awareness. Naturally, every brand wants to invest in it. But for a long time, brands have been focusing merely on the big holidays and missing out on several regional ones like Chinese New Year for example.
Regional holidays like this one hold significance because with them you get to tap into specific demographics and thus foster more authentic connections. That’s one way to stand out in a crowded market.
Globalization has made it possible for brands to access customers worldwide, so there is no reason to limit yourself. On that note, Chinese New Year is a festival that a majority of Asian populations worldwide celebrate. Not to mention, that the Chinese population is a major market for major tech, fashion, and other lifestyle brands.
Chinese New Year’s Significance on Social Media
So, why social media? Given that there are many ways to connect with customers in the digital realm.
Well, keep reading. 😉
Brand Awareness
Not every brand has the opportunity or the necessity to work on a Chinese New Year-related product. It is quite possible that your brand does not directly connect with this holiday and it is okay. In such cases, launching any other full-blown campaign with a huge investment does not seem like a good idea.
With social media, you can use your social media pages and share greetings without actually creating a campaign. Features like Stories also make it easy to share greetings and other fleeting posts without them coming onto the feed and interrupting your page’s aesthetics.
Additionally, hashtags related to the festival start trending as the New Year approaches, using them and creating a few posts makes it possible to take your brand to more people.
Higher Reach
Quick fact: An estimated 5.22 billion people around the world are social media users. That is roughly 63.8% of the world population.
So yes, the reach can be massive when you leverage social media intuitively. Besides, this is one platform that holds the power to make you go viral. And trendjacking is a great way to do that.
Regional holidays like Chinese New Year spark a lot of social media conversations. Therefore hopping on to the trend and creating engaging posts helps boost your brand’s reach.
Better Targeting
With social media, you can pick and choose who sees your message. And you can take it miles away from where you are sitting. This is a significant feature because, for Chinese New Year, your target audience can be just about anywhere. And the advertisements you run will reap much better returns when you have the option to target your potential customers based on their preferences.
When you are creating high-quality designs for the holiday, why not optimize its distribution too? This is why social media is the way to go for your Chinese New Year marketing campaigns.
But it is not the easiest medium to be on especially when you are looking to score with a holiday that everyone is trying to get a piece of.
That’s why we have here a curated list of some of the most engaging Chinese New Year social media post ideas for your brand.
But first, let’s start by taking a look at the design elements that can make your Chinese New Year social media posts shine.
Chinese New Year Social Media Posts: An Overview of Design Elements and Platforms
So you are excited to be on social media and start promoting your campaign for Chinese New Year. Understandably, you approach a design team to get the designs sorted. However, being clear about what you are looking for makes the design collaboration much more productive.
So here is a quick breakdown of what works best in Chinese New Year social media posts:
Design Elements
- Let’s start with the color scheme because colors set the mood of the design. To resonate with the festive cheer, we recommend using bright colors such as red and gold. They also signify wealth and prosperity in Chinese culture.
- Next comes the font selection. This is a season of joy and happiness. Families are coming together and want to celebrate this. Pick fonts that help you convey this message concisely. Sans-serif and script font styles work the best here. In the case of scripts, use them for headings that are large enough to be easy to read. You can also choose custom fonts that pay an ode to Chinese culture. But always remember: appreciate, don’t appropriate. Use elements tastefully and consult others who can guide you in this if you’re unsure.
- In terms of imagery and styling, your best inspiration comes from the zodiac animal of the year. Given that 2025 is the year of the snake, incorporate snake imagery into your Chinese New Year social media posts.
In terms of platforms. Chinese New Year gets a lot of mentions especially on X (formerly Twitter), Snapchat, and Instagram due to the young and active users on them. If you are a B2B brand, you can also consider creating designs that work on LinkedIn.
7 Creative Chinese New Year Social Media Post Ideas + Design Tips
So far in this blog, we have covered the significance of Chinese New Year on social media, and what an ideal post must look like in terms of its design. It is now time to get down to business.
Social media is an incredibly competitive platform. Everyone is constantly creating and posting. Even with a billion daily users, audience attention is hard to get for most brands. This competition heightens even more when there is a holiday around the corner.
That’s why we’re bringing you the 6 most creative Chinese New Year social media post ideas along with some design tips for each.
1) Greetings
Let us start off small. The advantage of creating greetings in the age of the internet is that a good greeting design can become an instantly shareable design. And this is a fool-proof idea that works in nearly every industry and for nearly every brand big and small.
You can use a greeting card format to launch a countdown to any sale or promotions you may launch in the coming days as well. Or it can just be a great way to interact with your customers on social media – just to spread the festive cheer without trying to sell anything.
Social media greetings posts for festivals come in various formats:
- Video greetings from your brand with/without employees and brand ambassadors. In Asia, the ambassador culture is huge and is very similar to the influencer marketing culture you see everywhere else. So this is a great way to engage the audience.
- A simple static graphic design wishing your audience.
- GIFs that engage the audience and allow them to stay for a minute or two extra on your profile.
Happy Chinese New Year! UATC sends our warmest greetings to all celebrating the festival around the world. We wish you and your families prosperity, health, and happiness in the Year of the Rabbit. #HappyChineseNewYear2023 pic.twitter.com/Ml20GY2wIN
— UATC (@uatcnews) January 21, 2023
KIMP Tip: Irrespective of the format of greetings, always ensure that your brand’s visual identity is part of these designs. You must balance it with the traditional color and design elements of the holiday for best results.
GIFs are a great greeting idea as it is easy to share with friends and family off the social media platform too.
2) Sale announcements and teasers
Most major brands with a sizable following that celebrate Chinese New Year announce sales and special promotions. It helps them connect with a very particular demographic and shows them that they are special to the brand.
People are always on the lookout for ways to save when they shop and holiday discounts are timeless tools to appeal to this section of your audience. Data shows that about 45% of shoppers look for inspiration for holiday gifts on Instagram. So if your posts give them this inspiration along with some discounts as well, then there is a good chance of a sale happening.
If you have a sizable time frame in the lead-up to your sale and you want to get your audience excited to know more about the sale, we recommend launching a sale teaser video as well.
Customers always watch more videos than static graphic designs, not to mention that most social media platforms promote video content more than any other content form. Therefore, an engaging video announcing the categories or products on sale will maximize your impact.
For example, here is a fun sale announcement from Shopee.
View this post on Instagram
KIMP Tip: Create teasers to build anticipation for your sale but keep them short. That will make it ideal to use on platforms like Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and Snapchat to name a few.
Looking to create engaging teaser videos for your social media? Try out a KIMP Video subscription.
3) Promote contests and giveaways
Contests are timeless engagement tactics brands have been using both on online and offline channels. Contests create a space and opportunity for customers to engage with the brand. This can be through social media post engagement or an in-store contest where they get to participate to stand a chance to win a prize.
Giveaways are a recent trend to explore as well. They work particularly well on social media platforms.
One idea to boost engagement with your Chinese New Year marketing strategy is to plan an offline or online contest or giveaway. Use your social media pages to discuss this contest. Create posts that outline the rules, the rewards and other essential details.
For a Chinese New Year giveaway, you can opt for products that are trending and relevant to the audience for the holiday such as gifting items for maximum engagement.
Here’s a post from Pepsi announcing a contest for Chinese New Year. This one adopts the offline format inviting customers to make an actual purchase to participate in the contest.
View this post on Instagram
Taking cues from this idea you can create something suitable for a multi-channel campaign or something entirely online where you boost the tags and mentions for your brand on social media.
4) Influencer marketing
The brand ambassador culture is huge in Asia. But landing a high-profile individual to endorse your brand or campaign isn’t exactly possible for small businesses considering the budget that most macro-influencers and mega-influencers set.
So what do you do that achieves the same results but in a much more accessible way? You work with Chinese micro-influencers who can connect with the audience, understand the heritage and culture, and can deliver good content that converts.
Take the below campaign from Gucci for example. It features Gucci’s Tiger Capsule collection introduced to celebrate the Chinese New Year in 2022. The campaign featured a host of Asian models including Kuya Okai featured in the post.
View this post on Instagram
Or here’s another one from Sephora which is a simple Reel following the recommendations and traditions of popular social media influencer Emily Ferrier. The content feels authentic and relatable.
View this post on Instagram
5) Promote limited-edition products
Themed product launches are crucial components of holiday marketing. Hence creating a limited-edition product or packaging design for Chinese New Year is an idea worth exploring.
Social media can be a great place to promote these limited-edition Chinese New Year-themed products.
For example, Coca-Cola shared a simple animated video introducing their special Chinese New Year themed cans for the 2025 celebration.
View this post on Instagram
Pepsi too had an animated graphic to announce this.
View this post on Instagram
Animated posts like these draw the audience’s attention to the key details like the theme for the year or specific changes made to celebrate the festive cheer.
Need help creating simple animated loops and cinemagraphs to promote your Chinese New Year special merchandise? Get a KIMP Video subscription!
6) Curated gift guides
Even if the location changes and the culture changes, you will be happy to know that some things stay constant in all holiday marketing campaigns. And one of them is the immense popularity of gift guides.
The Chinese New Year is a joyous occasion and a time when the entire family comes together. So obviously they shower each other with gifts to express their love. No matter what the occasion and culture is, gifting is a joyful thing. But buying those gifts? That’s a stressful process!
Why not make it easier for your customers in the 2025 Chinese New Year?
Create personalized gift guides based on your product range and what you think will be the ideal gifting products in each category. Some popular categories usually are gifts for mom, gifts for dad, gifts for wife/husband, and so on.
Publishing these on social media and tagging the products featured reduces the friction in the shopping process and brings in revenue.
Here’s an example from a Singapore-based gifting website, Giftano. The visual gift guide clearly breaks down the value and relevance of each recommendation. From shipping details to product photos, the gift guide has it all.
View this post on Instagram
KIMP Tip: Catalog-style carousels like the one from Giftano are popular and convenient as well. You can also easily repurpose them as collection ads on supported platforms. Additionally, you can create simple animated slideshows for Reels and Shorts or quick video shopping guides as well. These are formats that help improve your CTR and engagement rates.
7) Announce brand collaborations for the holiday
While some brands find it advantageous to collaborate with influencers for their Chinese New Year social media campaigns, some might benefit from brand partnerships. These could be local brand collaborations to target a small local audience.
For example, KFC announced a collab with Mofusand and introduced a collection of plush keychains and more for Chinese New Year 2025.
View this post on Instagram
Evidently, brand partnerships like these add more meaning to holiday merchandise and also create a single theme that resonates with customers.
Create Engaging Social Media Posts for Chinese New Year With KIMP
Are you excited to share some social media posts this Chinese New Year? And don’t worry if it sounds like a lot of work. It is completely worth it when you are targeting one of the biggest markets with content that is very significant to them.
To help you ace these campaigns, you’ll need some stellar designs. And that’s where the KIMP Graphics and KIMP Video subscriptions come in. You get unlimited design requests, revisions, and an expert team to deliver all you want at a flat monthly fee.
So why wait? Sign up for the free trial now and get ready for the Year of the Snake.