Hashtag Holidays and Your Business

The following is a slightly edited transcript of our Twitter Spaces chat about how Hashtag holidays are a great way to stay connected with your audience and add some fun flare to your content.

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Hashtag holidays are great opportunities to improve your marketing and online presence. Everyone knows about the typical holidays, such as New Years, Valentine’s Day, and so on. However, there are also tons of smaller, unique holidays throughout every month of the year that you can incorporate into your marketing plans to create fun or impactful content that reaches a very broad audience. Each of these smaller holidays has its own hashtag associated with it, hence the name hashtag holidays. With this in mind, we want to share with you a handful of upcoming hashtag holidays that you may want to add to your content calendar.

Potential April Holidays to Highlight
○ April 1 - April Fools' Day #AprilFools
○ April 7 - World Health Day #WorldHealthDay #LetsTalk
○ April 16 - Wear PJs to Work Day #PJDay
○ April 21 - National High-Five Day #NH5D
○ April 22 - Earth Day #EarthDay2022

To start April out with some fun flare, there’s April Fools Day on April 1st. Obviously, this is one of the better known holidays, but it’s a classic and a great day to get active on social media. One fun example of how a company used April Fools Day as a marketing tool was when Google announced that their search engine could search smells for you. While this was obviously a prank, it was successful at creating buzz and conversation surrounding their company and the true capabilities of their search tools. While April Fools' Day is a great time to incorporate humor and good fun into your marketing, you’ll still want to be sure that everything is done in good taste and that it doesn’t leave a negative impression of your company.

Another great hashtag holiday happening in April is World Health Day on April 7th. This is a good time to encourage your customer base to find time to prioritize physical and mental health in their day-to-day lives. A wonderful way to do this is to become relatable to your audience and lead by example by either sharing a health practice that you personally implement in everyday life, or by sharing a way that your company encourages and prioritizes their employees’ health.

Next up in April is wear your pajamas to work day on April 16th. This day can bring fun into the workplace by providing a relaxed and enjoyable environment for your employees. You can also share the fun with your following and personalize your brand by posting pictures of you and your crew sporting your best pajama sets. 

Following wear your pajamas to work day is National High Five Day on April 21st. With everything going on in the world, it may be more practical to give virtual high-fives, rather than physical ones, so you can celebrate the day by highlighting your customers or giving them shout-outs that are labeled as virtual high-fives. Of
course, giving physical high-fives to the people around you is also a great way to boost morale and share some happiness as well.

There are tons of other hashtag holidays in April, but the last one I’ll talk about is Earth Day on April 22nd. This is another amazing opportunity to bring awareness to a cause, or even highlight the ways that your company commits to preserving or improving the state of our planet. Depending on what’s feasible for your business, you can even encourage sales on Earth Day by creating a benefit associated with a purchase, such as donating 1% of each sale toward an eco-friendly cause. 

Potential May Holidays to Highlight
○ May 1 - International Workers' Day #IntWorkersDay
○ May 9 - Mothers Day #MothersDay
○ May 16 - Love a Tree Day #LoveATreeDay
○ May 24 - National Scavenger Hunt Day #NationalScavengerHuntDay
○ May 30 - National Creativity Day #NationalCreativityDay

Again, starting with the first day of the month, May 1st is International Workers Day. I like this hashtag holiday because it is a good time for companies to show appreciation for their workforce, which I think in turn builds customer and employee appreciation for the company. Some ways to celebrate this day could be highlighting exemplary employees via social posts, sharing a way that you’re going to give back to your employees on this day, or simply posting a reminder about how important workers are to the overall success of a company.

A well known holiday in May is Mother's Day on May 9th. Using Mother’s Day to acknowledge and honor the Mother’s in your business, customer base, or even community is a wonderful way to share the love on this day.  Next up is Love a Tree Day on May 16th. If you missed Earth Day, or if nature related causes are simply of high importance to you and your company, Love a Tree Day is another chance to amplify your voice on the topic. A few ideas for content on this day are to keep it simple by sharing facts about trees to bring  awareness, run a sales campaign similar to what we mentioned for Earth Day, or even take a step further
and physically plant a tree in honor of the occasion. 

National Scavenger Hunt Day on May 24th is a super fun one to incorporate into your planning. For an in-person way to celebrate, you can set up a scavenger hunt around your office, store, or other business location, and have a reward waiting at the end of the hunt. On the other hand, for the businesses who primarily depend on their websites for traffic, you can still take part by setting up a virtual scavenger hunt that
leads to a discount or fun promotion for your customers to apply at checkout. Not only is a scavenger hunt fun and entertaining, but it also encourages your customers to explore your business or website in depth and may help them find even more reasons to love your company.

Another fun hashtag holiday is on May 30th, and it’s National Creativity Day. There are so many ways to celebrate this holiday and show your creative side to your social media following. If your company sells products, you can launch something new and extra creative on this day, or change up your packaging to something fun and different from the norm. If you’re looking for something more personable, you can
use the day as an excuse to have a creative bonding time with your employees or team and share pictures of the event on social. Or, if you want a smaller scale way to honor the day, you can simply get creative with your marketing assets. Create something fun, festive, and eye catching and be sure to add  #nationalcreativityday to whatever you decide to post to tie it all together.

Possible June Holidays to Highlight
○ June 1 - National Say Something Nice Day #SaySomethingNice
○ June 2 - National Leave the Office Early Day #LeaveTheOfficeEarlyDay
○ June 11 - National Make Life Beautiful Day #MakeLifeBeautiful
○ June 20 - First Day of Summer and Father’s Day #FirstDayOfSummer #FathersDay
○ June 21 - National Selfie Day #NationalSelfieDay
○ June 30 - Social Media Day #SocialMediaDay

Moving right along, June also starts out with a hashtag holiday on the first of the month, and it’s National Say Something Nice Day. I love this one because it reminds everyone to bring positivity to the forefront of their day. This would be a great excuse to compliment and highlight people in your company for the different ways they help keep business running smoothly, or even compliment your customer base. Another cute idea would be to do a video montage, or even just share some quotes of people involved in your business speaking on something positive. 

National Make Life Beautiful Day is on June 11th every year. This holiday is used to celebrate the people who make life beautiful for those around them, and there are a lot of ways that you can honor this day. You may choose to highlight a person, or people, who have made life beautiful for you or for those in your company. You can share with your followers the beauty that you find in everyday life and encourage them to identify beautiful aspects of their life as well. Or you can create and share a goal for how you will give back and contribute to the beautification of life for others. 

Up next is the first day of summer, which is definitely something to celebrate, and it falls on June 20th. For the businesses with products, you may think about doing a summer themed product launch on this day. Other options are to use social media to share fun summer tips, tricks, or topics that could help improve your audience’s summer experience, or to share ways that you personally spend your time during the summer season. Again, these holidays are chances for you to be truly in tune with and relatable to your customer base, so have some fun with it. Also falling on June 20th is Father's Day. Keeping with the same spirit of Mother’s Day, you can offer some love and acknowledgement to the fathers you know, whether it be personally or professionally.

The last hashtag holidays we will hit on are National Selfie Day on June 21st and Social Media Day on June 30th. What better days to get active on social media than the days that are devoted to social media themselves? For National Selfie Day, you can ask your customers or employees to submit their best selfies and share the faces of your company and customer base along with a loving shoutout. For Social Media
day, whether you want to share some history about social media, hit on ways that social media ties into your business and life, or merely acknowledge social media day, it’s fully up to you on how you want to tie it into your marketing strategy. 

Hashtag holidays are fun, and provide so many different opportunities for businesses to grow their social media presence, as well as shed light on views and values that companies may have. As we’ve mentioned, there are many more hashtag holidays that you can get involved with, and I highly recommend staying up-to-date on what those are, so you can really utilize them when it comes to social media and marketing. If you do choose to incorporate hashtag holidays into your social media plan, be sure to always include the # associated with the holiday of choice to ensure that your post gets associated with that hashtag holiday.