SOCIAL MEDIA HOLIDAYS: GREAT MARKETING TOOLS

Did you know that Bubble Bath Day day is coming up? How about Clean Off Your Desk Day day?! Bet you didn’t even know those were holidays worth celebrating, eh? Well, with social media these days everything is worthy of being celebrated!

Unlike a major or religious holiday, a social media/hashtag holiday is a micro (or un-official) holiday celebrating specific foods, activities, behaviours, trends, etc. These kinds of holidays live on social media and brands rely on them to get followers to engage with their posts or to simply have a cause for celebration (or let’s face it, an excuse to eat fries on #NationalFrenchFryDay)!

Below, I’ve listed some things to consider when sifting through the holidays, how to choose the right ones to fit your very own content calendar and ways to use social media holidays as a marketing strategy.

PIN THIS TO DOWNLOAD THE CALENDAR AGAIN LATER!

Is the holiday brand relevant?

With the huge list to choose from, it can be difficult to choose which holidays to take advantage of and which ones to pass out on. Just remember that any content you produce should still be relevant to your business and a good fit for your brand image and audience.

For example, if you’re a food blogger, you might want to highlight all the food related holidays (there are lots!) and re-post some of your favourite recipes on that day. This should drive lots of new traffic to your blog as people will be more likely to browse the holiday hashtag that day and fall on your post. On the other hand, you might not want to take part in the Book Lover’s Day if it doesn’t relate to your audience.

Use the mini holiday as an excuse to promote your product/message or to run a sale.

National handbag day is a shameless opportunity to promote your product if you make handmade purses for example. Or even Earth day is another great opportunity to share your message with the world about protecting our waters for example.

Running a one day sale is also a great way to drive extra traffic to your shop. Make sure to tease this sale in the weeks or days before the holiday to get your audience exited and to drum up attention. With the extra boost in views, you might also gain a few extra followers.

Easily fill up your feed.

These social media holidays can be great tools for small businesses to use throughout the year. If you find yourself struggling to come up with ideas on what to post, come back to these and see if anything inspires you. There are often more than one mini holiday on a certain date, so these social media holidays are a great place to start in order to fill up that content calendar. Each month also has weekly events along with month-long events. Those kinds of holidays are very flexible as you could post about them anytime throughout the month/week. Again, just don’t forget to keep the posts consistent with your brand.

Watch out for hijacked hashtags.

A good rule of thumb before using any hashtag (holiday or not) is to double-check what’s being posted in that hashtag’s feed. Some hashtags might get hijacked by spammy accounts over time and you might not want you content mixing in with that kind of stuff. So before using a hashtag just go check up on it and make sure it’s looking healthy.

Plan ahead!

It’s well-known that planning your Instagram feed or scheduling your Facebook posts in advance is the key to a happy and coordinated social media feed, but what about all of those hashtag holidays that you only seem to find out about once it’s too late?! Well, I’ve created a Social Media and Hashtag Holiday calendar for you to download to help you plan your content ahead of time. I’ve consolidated all the fun and interesting holidays, so with this document, you can highlight which ones you want to follow and find out the hashtag to use for each specific holiday!

When you have all the holidays you want to partake in written down ahead of time, you can make sure to shoot your products or find your stock photos so they are ready to post on the day of.

Related: Top 7 Free Stock Photo Websites

And that’s it! Hashtag holidays are a fun way to drum up excitement on your social media platforms and engage your audience. Have I forgotten any important holidays? Which one is your favourite to celebrate? Let me know down in the comments below.