Ready or not, the biggest shopping weekend of the year is almost here. Not only do Black Friday and Cyber Monday kick off the festive season, but these two days represent a significant portion of many retailers’ overall sales.

According to Adobe Analytics, US retailers earned $7.9 billion on Black Friday last year, while Cyber Monday saw an additional $6.6 billion in online sales. In the UK, shoppers spent an estimated £7.8 billion across both days. With so much riding on these big shopping days, it’s crucial that retailers lock down their Twitter strategy now. Here are five things you can do to help your business start the holiday shopping season right.

Get your profile in order

If you haven’t looked at your Twitter profile in a while, now’s the time to go in and give it a refresh. Update your banner, bio, profile photo, and links. Your links should reflect your holiday promotions, hours, appropriate landing pages, and holiday-specific hashtags. Don’t forget to pin a Tweet to the top that reflects your most essential holiday information.

Use the right hashtags

Your customers will be using hashtags like #BlackFriday and #CyberMonday to find out about the best sales, so make sure you include them in your hashtag rotation. While you’ll definitely want to use them on the big day, remember that people are planning their shopping days, or even weeks, in advance — if you have a great promotion planned, it’s almost never too early to start using these hashtags to promote it.

Create Twitter-only deals

A surefire way to get engagement on Twitter is to offer content your customers can’t find anywhere else. When it comes to holiday shopping, that means sales. In the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving weekend, build anticipation by offering discounts and promotions that are exclusive to Twitter. This gives people a reason to follow your account and to regularly check your feed.

Use Twitter for customer service

If something is wrong with your product or one of your locations, Twitter is the place where customers will share that information. If you don’t already use Twitter for customer service, make sure you have a customer service rep assigned to your social marketing team. This rep can then monitor your mentions and brand hashtags so you can quickly respond to questions or complaints.

Invest in great content

High-quality imagery and well-written posts are always recommended, but this is the time of year when your posts truly have to shine if you want to cut through the clutter. Put in the extra hours to create the best content you can, and then make sure you have the necessary advertising budget to spread your best work far and wide. You’ve been creating content all year long; by now you should have the data to know what your audience really wants to see. This holiday season is the time to put the data to work.

Ready to get started? Create your own campaign.

Additional reading:

• How to plan your holiday Tweet schedule
• What you should be doing now to get your business ready for the holidays
• 4 ways to feature products in your Twitter campaigns this gift-giving season