Five ways to use awareness days to boost social media engagement

What with National Cheeseburger Day, Lumpy Rug Day and Lost Sock Memorial Day, you'll find a plethora of weird and wonderful 'holidays' to join in with on social media. Ideal for a slow news day granted, but is jumping on the celebratory bandwagon an effective way to leverage brand awareness?

It’s all very well sharing ‘National Walnut Day’ (17th May since you asked ;-) but unless your company has some link to walnuts then it’s just white noise on your channels. In fact, posting for the sake of it can send people diving for the unfollow button.

With the rising number of social media platforms and customers flitting between them you have an even shorter window to catch attention so, if you’re planning on celebrating an awareness day, here are five ways to keep customers engaged and away from that unfollow button:

1. Appeal to emotion

How do you want the audience to feel having read your post? Happy? Excited? Amused? Emotional?

Take Mother’s Day as a popular example as most companies post a token ‘Happy Mother’s Day’ along with a pleasant (read twee) image of tea and cake.

Bear in mind though, your customers' feed is stuffed full of these posts from other companies doing exactly the same thing so there’s really nothing in it for your customer other than seeing more of the same.

Make your post content unique, company relevant and maybe even with something in it for your customers. You could ask a few employees the most valuable life lesson their mother taught them and post these in an eye catching image. Or, run a ‘Motherly Love’ competition where you send a small gift to the comment with the best story/answer/picture.

As a side note, while it's likely some of your customers are mothers, this demographic may not be your target market. However if they are your target market, you should really up your game and make a big deal out of this day. If you plan on running a competition where (only) mum can win an uninterrupted overnight stay in a luxury hotel with breakfast in bed and late checkout, tag me in it immediately.

2. Link the day & do some prep

Make sure there’s some sort of connection to what you’re posting about, even a tenuous link means you stay relevant and can also be quite amusing. You may plan on posting about World Chocolate Day (7th July) but your company sells fishing nets, so do some ground work to gain the link. You could find out the favourite chocolate bars of all your staff then gift them on the day meaning great happy photos to use alongside the post and you’ll be able to legitimately piggy back onto the popular #WorldChocolateDay hashtag with your brand.

3. Drive engagement

The more people who comment or engage with your post, the more feeds it will appear in which is a great (and free) exposure boost. World Book Day (3rd March) is a good one to plan for as books are relevant to any industry. To drive engagement, you could ask people to name their favourite book and why; it’s hard to resist replying when you’re asked for your opinion.

4. Use hashtags

They connect content on social media to a specific topic and work on all social media platforms. Posts with relevant hashtags means you'll show up in relevant searches as part of the conversation and could attract new followers who'd never have found you otherwise.

Well known days like #WorldBookDay are also good because the hashtag usually ends up trending (becomes popular therefore receiving more visibility) and the more interesting/fun/innovative your posts, the more engagement your posts will get.

5. Schedule more than one post

Spending time preparing the content for an awareness day should mean you have lots of media to play with. Search through the old cutting room floor leftovers and use behind the scenes video or photographs, a time lapse of preparations or even a reel of funny out takes. Make sure you have posts scheduled throughout the day, using the hashtag, to optimise your audience reach.

Celebrating a day simply by commenting on it doesn't cut it anymore. As social media evolves, users are becoming more demanding and exclusive with their time so make sure you put the effort into these types of post. You'll win favour with audiences by delivering interesting content and, by encouraging engagement, the weird and wonderful world of social media algorithms will present your posts to more users.

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