If you’ve spent more than five minutes on social media, you’ll know there is an awareness day for everything. From dogs and donuts to health and holidays – awareness days give brands an opportunity to connect with their existing audience in a topical and light-hearted way.
Simultaneously, awareness days allow social media managers to position a brand as a relevant player in a particular field or in alignment with a particular topic that is trending that day, week, or month.
While it may seem like fun to chime in on #nationalpizzaday – there is an art to using awareness days to improve your reach and engagement on social media. But how do you decide which days are dud and which offer the most opportunity with your target audience?
Get Organised
If you don’t have one in place already, a content calendar is an invaluable tool for planning your social media feeds and identifying where there might be natural gaps to fill with awareness days or holiday content that compliments your key messaging.
Lucky for your social media manager, there are a plethora of ready-made content calendars out there that are refreshed year-on-year to pull from to complement their strategy – it then comes down to compiling and tailoring them to suit your needs, all in one place. Create an excel tracker or why not set reminders on your email calendar for upcoming awareness days that work for your brand or client.
This is also handy if you are working to strict budgets. Knowing when relevant awareness days are likely to crop in advance better enables social media managers to plan boosting budgets for campaigns tied intrinsically to them.
Quality over quantity
Do your research. Tactical and responsive hashtag use can make or break a social media campaign but Awareness Days by their very nature, use extremely high-density hashtags.
This means that the organic reach will be small due to the sheer amount of content being pushed out on any given awareness day using that hashtag. But that does not mean it isn’t worth doing. This is where it is essential that your message adds value and that your content in engaging and in a format that is likely to get noticed (*cough* video *cough* interactive graphics, and so on).
Where high-density hashtags don’t always generate leads, followers, or engagement – using them is an effective way to start building association for a brand with bigger theme, issue or conversation, and over time, build visibility with audiences who are seeking out that kind of content.
Mid- and low-density hashtags however have less competition and should be used in conjunction with high-density hashtags to help brands in accessing these new audiences in a more personalised fashion and can help to organically grow your community at a slow and steady rate.
This is where it is important to be selective. Whatever their density, ensure the hashtags you are using are relevant to your brand, sector or audience and that they allow your brand to share insights or messages that they are passionate about, that ultimately add value to your followers feeds.
Create stand out content
While static posts and infographics still have their place on social (at least for the moment), video or video animation is a growing driver of engagement and conversions as we move in to 2023.
In fact, according to HubSpot, people are watching more video online than ever before – the amount of online video watched has almost doubled since 2018. Wyzowl’s State of Video Marketing report found that 62% of marketing professionals consider video engagement their top metric. Views or plays were a close second at 61% in 2021 – and this has only escalated in 2022.
With social platform algorithms not just favouring, but outrightly pushing short-form video content, it would be an oversight not to consider this medium to make your content stand out – whether that be produced by you, or in collaboration with creators and influencers relevant to your brand.
Put a plan into action
Once you have established the awareness days that will resonate most with your audience, it’s time to get planning, then get posting.
Don’t forget, there are also ways you can integrate awareness day driven activity into your wider PR and marketing strategy. Consider sharing your involvement in an awareness day within your email marketing campaigns and newsletters, or as a topic hook for a press release – the opportunities to align across the many disciplines are endless.
Need some help structuring your social media strategy? Get in touch with Shorthose Russell and Thissaway to learn how we can help: [email protected]
