The tradition-laden holiday season is a feeding ground for evergreen content. But creating engaging seasonal content is not as simple as tweeting about pumpkin spice lattes.

To understand the trends and tactics among this season’s best Halloween content, we used the keyword search feature in our platform’s activity feed to surface the most viral autumnal content from the tens of thousands of brands in our database.

Filtering for seasonal keywords like halloween, pumpkin, costume, haunted house, and even pumpkin spice latte, we noticed a trend: Ellen Degeneres.

For nearly every Halloween-related keyword, content from the various marketing channels for The Ellen Degeneres Show was among the top performers.

So what are Degeneres and her marketing team doing right? Here are a few of the strategies they implemented to hijack Halloween with engaging seasonal content.

She Harnesses The Anticipatory Excitement Of The Holidays

Degeneres has taken the annual query “What are you going to be for Halloween this year?” and hijacked it on a larger scale with “What is Ellen going to be for Halloween this year?” It’s a mega branding strategy that ensures that the reveal of her costume will generate a rainfall of evergreen for years to come.

She Curates Halloween Content With The Branded Hashtag #HallowEllen

On her Instagram account in particular, Degeneres has seen a stream of viral content over the past few years with photos tagged with the hashtag #HallowEllen.

Below are the top 10 most engaged-with #HallowEllen posts from her Instagram account over the past two years alone. (Notice the cobwebbed Ellen pumpkin saw more engagement than the plain, non-cobwebbed pumpkin.)

I showed you my costume, now show me yours. #HallowEllen

A photo posted by Ellen (@theellenshow) on Oct 10, 2013 at 8:42pm PDT

Good luck telling us apart. #HallowEllen A photo posted by Ellen (@theellenshow) on Oct 10, 2012 at 9:39am PDT

Thanks for submitting your photos to #HallowEllen! See if you can find yours here: bit.ly/RuMqkV

A photo posted by Ellen (@theellenshow) on Nov 11, 2012 at 1:50pm PDT

My spook-tacular Halloween set. #HallowEllen A photo posted by Ellen (@theellenshow) on Oct 10, 2012 at 2:56pm PDT

Getting ready! #hallowellen A photo posted by Ellen (@theellenshow) on Oct 10, 2012 at 4:35pm PDT

#HallowEllen A photo posted by Ellen (@theellenshow) on Oct 10, 2012 at 11:22am PDT

My staff getting in the #HallowEllen spirit!

A photo posted by Ellen (@theellenshow) on Oct 10, 2012 at 12:00pm PDT

Thanks to my amazing audience for dressing up. Y’all looked great! #hallowellen A photo posted by Ellen (@theellenshow) on Nov 11, 2012 at 12:09pm PDT

Cute kid’s Halloween costumes and the cute kids wearing them. Show me yours at #HallowEllen @the_ellen_show A photo posted by Ellen (@theellenshow) on Oct 10, 2012 at 11:42am PDT

My staff’s Halloween costumes. #hallowellen A photo posted by Ellen (@theellenshow) on Nov 11, 2012 at 10:40am PDT

For our Fortune 500 Instagram Report, we studied the content published on Instagram by companies in the Fortune 500, and found that the most successful brands approach Instagram as a social discovery platform.

Using hashtags is key to maximizing this social discovery factor, helping users to find content among common trends in aggregate. With the branded hashtag #HallowEllen, Degeneres and team have done just that.

She Creates And Distributes Channel-Specific Content

While behind-the-scenes Halloween content from her talk show performs best on Instagram, Degeneres has also created and curated myriad sub-categories to bolster her Halloween content strategy, from Babies in Pumpkins to a viral video series featuring celebrities in haunted houses.

But Degeneres and team have taken their strategy a step further by tailoring specific content themes to the most relevant channels.

On Pinterest, for example, Ellen has seen above-average engagement by curating content for her “Kids Halloween Costumes” series. Here are a few of her most viral Pins from this series:

While photos of cute, costumed babies proved engaging to Degeneres’ Pinterest audience, she found success on YouTube by reposting video segments from her talk show. For example, Degeneres has created a stream of evergreen Halloween content by posting videos from her series of celebrities in haunted houses:

Ellen is, of course, funny — and having an über-popular daytime talk show as a platform certainly doesn’t hurt. But these are just a few of the strategies content marketers can learn from Degeneres and team to create engaging, evergreen content this holiday season.