A Quick Guide to Social Media Holidays

You can see people celebrate a different social media holiday almost every day of the year. There’s a holiday for everything – emoji day, national mutt day, international talk like a pirate day, and many more. The good news is that each social media holiday provides you with unique marketing opportunities. Picking out some of the best could boost your income and sales figures.

In this article, we’ll talk about what the most popular social media holidays are and how to take advantage of them. Plus, we’ll go over which platforms you should focus your efforts on.

Let’s get to it!

The Most Popular Social Media Holidays You Should Know

Narrowing down the most popular social media holidays is a tough task. While most of these holidays get interactions across the globe, they might be more popular in certain regions.

Moreover, if you take a look at a social media holiday calendar, you’ll notice there are hundreds of events and hashtags. Some of our favorite examples include:

• #CheeseLoversDay on January 20th
• #PrivacyAware for Data Privacy Day on January 28th
• #WorldPoetryDay on March 22nd
• #GetToKnowYourCustomersDay on April 18th
• #MayThe4thBeWithYou or Star Wars Day on May 4th

There are plenty more holidays to consider too. Note that many of them are national – for example, the US celebrates a staggering amount of made-up holidays, such as #NationalCookieDay:

Knowing what and when those holidays are is only the first step, though. To leverage this information, you’ll want to use the right social media platforms.

How to Leverage Social Media Holidays (5 Tips)

Once you get to the full list of social media holidays, it’s up to you to choose how to leverage them to get your brand more attention. Here are a few recommendations for you to put into action.

1. Choose the Right Social Media Platforms for Your Content

In most cases, you should focus your brand’s social media efforts on the platforms that make sense for your niche. For example, if you run a website publishing recipes, you’d probably want to focus on Instagram and Pinterest, but also consider Twitter and Facebook.

Both of these platforms are popular options for leveraging ‘hashtag’ holidays. If you run a quick search for any social media holiday hashtag on those platforms, you’ll likely find hundreds of entries:

The platforms you use to publish social media holiday content will depend on what the content itself consists of. If it’s an image or meme, you’ll likely be able to crosspost it across all your social media accounts. However, for shorter text, you’ll want to stick with Twitter and Facebook. If you want to publish polls, you can do so on Twitter, Facebook, and even Instagram, thanks to stories.

Ultimately, if you want to stay organized, you’ll need a game plan for leveraging hashtag holidays, which brings us to the next tip.

2. Decide What Social Media Holidays to Focus On

Since there’s a new social media holiday almost every day of the year, it’s not very practical to try and leverage all of them. What’s more, many holidays simply won’t mesh well with your brand, so you might want to skip them.

If you like to plan ahead, we recommend that you look up a social media holidays calendar and make a list of the hashtags you want to create content for. You’ll want to consider the following:

• Does the holiday clash with something major or more lucrative?
• Is the focus of the holiday aligned with your brand and goals?
• Do the supporters of the holiday seem as though they want to be marketed to?
• If the answer to the previous question is “Yes”, do the supporters also seem ‘affluent’ enough to buy your products and services?

Doing this in advance will give you plenty of time to plan that content and even schedule it for automatic publication. That way, you won’t need to race to join the discussion on those dates.

3. Analyze the Content Other Brands and Users Are Publishing

If you’re not sure what type of content to publish for a specific hashtag holiday, you need to do a little bit of research. This involves finding the hashtag for the holiday you want to look up, and see what content other users are publishing.

Take #CleanOutYourRefrigeratorDay. On Twitter, the hashtag didn’t get all that much traction, with only a few posts garnering decent engagement:

However, the same holiday did a lot better on Instagram, with pictures of tidy fridges getting the most action:

Unless you’re a food brand, leveraging this hashtag might not make much sense. However, hashtag holidays often provide businesses with the chance to be creative when it comes to their marketing:

The great thing about this type of research is you can see what brands have published in the past on each platform. This can help you decide what type of content to publish, create it in advance, and put it on your schedule.

4. Encourage Follower Interactions

One of the most fun aspects of hashtag holidays is that they lend themselves perfectly to engaging with your followers. #NationalPetDay, for example, is basically begging for you to ask followers to share pictures of their pets for everyone else to see:

This is just one type of interaction you can engage with your followers in. Hashtag holidays also provide you with the perfect excuse to run giveaways or contests:

If you’re relatively new to social media, your brand might not have all that many followers. Contests and giveaways can be powerful tools to help you grow, and hashtag holidays can help you put those events in the spotlight.

As always, you want to make sure that any posts you make are relevant to the social media holiday hashtags you use and your brand.

5. Follow Best Social Media Practices

If you want your social media holiday content to succeed, you need to follow the same general rules that we recommend for other posts. Among those, we have:

• Provide value to your followers. That value can be entertainment, unique offers, or calls to engage with each other.
• Don’t overdo the hashtags. We recommend that you use two hashtags at the most (although this limit varies per social media platform). If possible, stick to only the official hashtag for the holiday that you’re creating content for.

It can be tempting to leverage hashtag holidays to promote your products or services. However, thiw kind of content often doesn’t do as well when it comes to engagement, which is precisely what you’re after with holiday posts.

By focusing on content that provides value and/or entertainment, you increase the chances that users will see and want to share it.

Conclusion

Social media holidays are the perfect excuse to post fun content to your brand’s profiles. Whether it’s pictures of pets, giveaways, memes, or even infographics, hashtag holidays give your business a chance to get more attention.

As for how to leverage social media holidays to get more followers and engagement, here’s what we recommend:

1. Choose the right social media platforms for your content.
2. Decide what social media holidays to focus on.
3. Analyze the content other users and brands are publishing.
4. Encourage follower interactions.
5. Follow best social media practices.

Do you have any questions about what to publish on social media holidays? Let’s talk about them in the comments section below!

Article thumbnail image by elenabsl / shutterstock.com