How Thinking Seasonally Can Help Your Social Media Posts

The value of social media marketing should not be underestimated. In addition to offering real-time interaction between a business and its customers, a social media presence is often simply expected and ignoring it could have customers turning towards your competitors.

 

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With so many social media outlets, a challenge many marketers face is how to keep up with the number of posts required, making each one relevant, timely and interesting. Of course, using news from within your organisation is essential; however, this may not be enough to keep your newsfeeds filled. Therefore, an easy way to ensure a reliable source of content is to think seasonally.

A quick run-down of the year sees plenty of opportunity for news, from Valentine’s Day to Easter, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, school holidays, back to school, Halloween, Christmas countdown and New Year. By exploiting the events occurring around us, generating new content becomes a little easier.

Of course, many of your competitors will be thinking seasonally too, so how can you make your content stand out, without become a slave to constantly thinking up new ideas? One way is use other, less well-known, seasonal activity to your advantage.

National Awareness Days are often quirky (National Talk like a Pirate Day anyone?), nationwide days that aim to shine a light on a particular issue. A great benefit of national awareness days is that because there are so many, finding one that can be linked to your business, service or product should not be too difficult. The posts can also be scheduled well in advance and often used across two or more posts. For example, a dentist may want to tell followers that 2^nd October 2015 is World Smile Day, offering the opportunity to tell followers about the day a week or so in advance (e.g. Don’t forget, 2^nd October 2015 is World Smile Day – better book a check-up now!), then on the day itself ‘Happy World Smile Day!’

 

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Some days lend themselves to particular businesses more than others, for example:

Restaurants & bars

(Jan) Farmhouse Breakfast Week

(Feb) Chip week

(May) British Sandwich Week

Health

(April) Allergy Awareness Week

(Nov) National Stress Awareness Day

Business

(Jan) Employee Motivation Day

(May) Learning at Work Week

Education

(Jan) National Storytelling week

(Feb) University Mental Health & Wellbeing Day

With so much potential for fun, quirky and interesting posts, utilising the seasonal calendar along with national awareness days is a must for those tasked with social media activity.

For ideas, check out www.awarenessdays.co.uk or www.projectbritain.com/specialdays for a month-by-month breakdown of national and world awareness events.