A FALCON.IO COMPANY

Strange Holidays and Bizarre Festivals – The calendar every social media manager needs to have on their desk

All of us know that Feb 14th is Valentine’s Day, but how many of us know that Feb 15th is Single Awareness Day? Recently, some unique and crazy holidays like “Hug Your Cat Day” and “Pi Day” (on which AdWeek did a great compilation) seem to have popped up out of nowhere and for no other reason than, well, they’re a bit weird.

Although some of these holidays could have been created by a cunning marketer, keen for an interesting opportunity to push their product, whatever the origins, they seem to have worked brilliantly for many brands. In an era where most brands are moving towards a trajectory of micro-content, these “national anything and everything” days spice up content strategy.

Other than diversifying strategy, posts related to these holidays seem to be bringing in tons of Likes, Favorites, Shares, Re-tweets and all the other kinds of engagement.

M&M’s has made greetings for these days a key part of their social strategy. Here is how it worked for the chocolate brand in 2013. M&M’s posted 369 updates on Facebook of which 19 were holiday greetings. What’s interesting is, while the brand received an average engagement score of 700 on the 369 posts, the 19 posts by themselves garnered a score of 839!

To make your life easier, we’ve curated a list of the most engaging unusual holidays for the year. Take a look at how brands leveraged them and converted them into a point of conversation and in turn into engagement. The release date for this report is no accident either because guess what? Today is Make Your Own Holiday Day so we’re celebrating it as “Publish A Fun Report Day”.

Don’t forget, all images are clickable and are hyperlinked to their original post. Click through and enjoy the report.

Watch this space for the second part of the calendar where we show you the bizarre things brands did on regular holidays.

Methodology

Unmetric compiled this report using Discover which helps content creators like you to find anything a brand has ever said about any topic by searching through 500,000,000+ items of branded content published by over 100,000 major brands over the last 5 years.