Sure – #NationalPeanutButterLoversDay or #WorldToiletDay might not seem directly relevant to your brand or your social media conversations (although now you know they exist and, actually, #WorldToiletDay is a pretty important charity campaign so if they’re applicable to you, you’re welcome). If you use our Heart and Soul Digital Content Planners, you might wonder why we spent so much time putting all these mad dates in the calendar.
Bizarre as some might be, they are supremely helpful for the content planning and content creation process. They provide marketing opportunities and even PR springboards almost every single day of the year. And for the overwhelmed marketer, that’s nothing to be sneezed at.
Let us show you how exactly how these national days are actually genius…
National days often trend
Even the most nonsensical-seeming ones end up in the Twitter trending box.
Behind every national day, there’s an individual, a group or a company pushing content and conversation on a wider scale than anyone realises because it has a connection with a brand or cause.
#WorldToiletDay is actually to raise awareness of the sanitation crisis that seriously affects 869 million people worldwide.
Very excited that faecal sludge management is the theme of #WorldToiletDay 2017! Info and resources: #SaMaSani #SDG6
— Lars Schoebitz (@larnsce) September 22, 2017
UK Coffee Week is a nationwide celebration of coffee that also raises funds for coffee growing communities. In 2017, £335,000 was raised as a result of UK Coffee Week for Project Waterfall, helping bring clean drinking water and sanitation to coffee-growing communities.
Funds from UK Coffee Week ’16 helped build water facilities in 10 @costafoundation schools in Uganda, changing lives through clean water.
— UK Coffee Week (@UKCoffeeWeek) September 19, 2017
So you see, these aren’t just a crock that someone’s made up, and trends have caught on by chance. With a little research, there’s often a meaningful movement behind a national day, and a good reason why they’re trending.
What does this mean for you? Well, if you can create content applicable to a trending day and to your social media channels, you can join that huge conversation and exercise some CSR with very little effort. We call that an all-round win, don’t you?
National days predict social media conversation
This brings us nicely to our second reason that national days are genius and a very clever way to make sure your content is relevant on every day of the year: if you set the UK’s national days out in calendar form, you can predict a bulk of the conversations that’ll be taking place on social media, and you can plan to interact with others on the subject.
So yes, it’s great that a national day is probably going to trend. But even if it’s not top of the conversation list, there’s still going to be some buzz, and you have a chance to plan what you bring to that discussion. You can’t lose here – get drafting and own it!
National days inspire content creation
There is nothing worse than sitting at 4 pm on a Friday with no fudging idea of what to schedule on your social media channels for the following week. It’s the worst. Your mind starts clogging up, you get distracted by other things, your inspiration levels feel totally wrung-out, and you either end up with some cop-out posts, or you abandon your social media content for the day, hoping inspiration will strike on Monday morning. And then you end up with no social media content. And then the whole cycle starts all over again.
We have been there so many times and it does not make us feel good. That’s why having national days mapped out in our calendar is an utter godsend – it’s automatic inspiration at the tips of our fingers, and with the right setup, you can employ the same tactic to stay inspired for social media content all the time.
If you want an easy, free and efficient way to stay up-to-date with UK national days and receive weekly prompts on what’s coming up, sign up to our mailing list. We’ll remind you every Monday morning what the week ahead holds, so you can always feel in control of your content creation, however busy you are.
And that, dear friends, is why those “crazy” national days are actually genius. Don’t ignore them!
