What are Awareness Days?
An awareness day, week or month is generally set up by an organisation or charity, to mark an occasion or anniversary or to raise money or awareness for a charity or cause and there are many to choose from (trust us – we’ve researched many of them!). Some mark important or poignant dates in history, some raise millions for charity and some of them are downright bonkers. Answer Your Cat’s Questions Day, we’re looking at you!
How should you use them?
Used correctly, awareness days can be a fantastic resource and a really important part of your social media strategy. Awareness and national days are incredibly popular on social media, generally used as hashtags and more often than not, trending on Twitter. This provides a golden opportunity to join the conversation, increase your engagement and reach new audiences.
The trick is to choose carefully and make use of the awareness days that are relevant to your business or brand. You can have some fun with it and your links can be tenuous, but they have to make sense and suit the overall tone of your business. Some of them are very niche but there are many that are easy to link to, like Get Organised Month and Awkward Moments Day (who doesn’t have one of those to share?). Aside from being great content hooks, get it right and you will increase traffic to your social media and website as well as raising awareness of your business.
The best thing about awareness days is the ability to plan ahead. Days are an annual event, set well in advance so if you use a reliable calendar, you can find your relevant days, plan your posts and schedule them way in advance at a time that suits you! This also removes the stress of trying to get a decent photo of your team on Christmas Jumper Day or Odd Socks Day when Julie from accounts forgets her jumper and the intern is late.
How else can I use them?
Why not also use awareness days in your overall marketing strategy? You could reference relevant events in your newsletters or publish a blog. If you want to raise money for a charity or cause, then you can run a campaign on your feed using their hashtag and encourage your clients or business contacts to support your endeavours. Anyone for Movember this year…?
Top Tips
Make the most of the opportunity. Take some time to take or source images or Gifs (who doesn’t love a Gif?!) to add to your post. The more visually engaging or amusing (where appropriate) your post, the more it will stand out and the higher you can expect the level of engagement to be. Injecting some humour into your social media in most cases is more than appropriate, it’s a great way to humanise your feed and keep your audience engaged.
Do keep an eye on what you have scheduled to go out, and this applies to any content you may have planned ahead. Posting light hearted and otherwise completely inoffensive content in the aftermath of a tragic accident or disaster could appear insensitive and reflect badly on your business.
How can I find them all?
It’s simple! We have a fantastic FREE awareness days calendar containing over 1000 awareness days which are regularly checked for accuracy and the best bit? You can export it into your existing online calendar such as Google or Outlook and if we spot a date change, it’ll auto update your end.