Holiday campaigns are a great opportunity to connect with your customers, think outside the box, and use a more casual tone in your messaging while still remaining on-brand. Here’s the catch: during most major holidays, such as Christmas or Halloween, your brand’s campaign will be competing against hundreds of others, possibly with bigger teams and budgets at their disposal. And while this doesn’t mean that you should give up all attempts to connect with your audience on these occasions, it’s a good reason to consider ways you can personalize your holiday campaigns to your industry and followers.

First, it helps to keep a content calendar, in order to anticipate all the holidays that might resonate with your social media audience. In addition to holidays that fall on the same day every year, take time to populate the calendar with seasonal events without set dates, such as Black Friday. Once you’re aware of your high-stakes dates, take note of your quiet months. Are you anticipating a chaotic February, just to hit a lull in both workloads and engagement metrics in March? If that’s the case for your brand, a fun project to consider is picking off-season, smaller dates that have universal appeal and potential for creative social media campaigns.

For example, a date not commonly remembered that we like to highlight is Dr. Seuss’s birthday. In the past two years, we’ve tipped our hat to the Green Eggs and Ham author’s unique style by writing a Dr. Seuss-inspired Twitter guide in 2014, and this year, by rhyming every Tweet sent from our official account.

Holiday campaigns such as the one inspired by the works of Dr. Seuss is the kind you want—fun to execute, efficient on resources, and relatable on a wide scale. Campaigns based on such fun holidays are also less likely to get lost in the noise of other brands’ messaging. A simple Google search can tell you the reason for celebration every day in a calendar year, from the birthday of your national flag to the lesser-known Don’t Step on a Bee Day. If you’re looking for some campaign inspiration in the upcoming months, we’ve picked 6 fun holidays to celebrate on social media.

6 fun holidays to celebrate on social media

Pi Day

mathematical - holidays to celebrate on social media

Observed annually on March 14, this holiday is typically celebrated with delicious baked goods and math puns. Even if your brand isn’t in the pie business, it’s a good opportunity to engage with the most mathematically-minded of your followers by organizing a trivia contest or a giveaway.

 

This year serves a special treat for math enthusiasts, as the sequence 3/14/15, especially if celebrated exactly at 9:26:53, will perfectly follow the sequence of pi (π to the tenth decimal = 3.141592653). So if the sheer mathematical awesomeness is not enough of an inspiration for a social media campaign, at least you can schedule your Pi Day greetings to go out at exactly 9:26 AM.

Tolkien Reading Day

If many of us feel the pings of nostalgia recalling rhymes from The Cat in the Hat, the feeling is even stronger when it comes to passages from The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings trilogy. Tolkien Reading Day celebrates our favorite stories that begat the most successful film adaptation and endless debates about the best fantasy series. This holiday is observed on March 25, which marks the fall of Sauron in the series. Seriously, just think of the cred you’ll get from Tolkien fans when everyone else is too busy organizing St. Patrick’s Day campaigns!

If you want to be a little more specific with your favorite characters, or want to dedicate more than just one day to Middle-earth, you can also think of a way to celebrate Hobbit Day on September 22, like Powell’s Bookstore did.

Star Wars Day

star wars day - holidays to celebrate on social media

Of course, your holiday pop culture calendar wouldn’t be complete without the 4th of May, the unofficial but highly celebrated Star Wars Day. The date is a pun on a famous quote from the Star Wars movie franchise, “May the force be with you”—“May the fourth be with you.” But it’s not just the Star Wars fans that join in the jubilations…

As with the rest of the fun holidays to celebrate on social media, your brand doesn’t have to be in the entertainment industry to celebrate May the 4th with your social media followers. Major brands like Starbucks, Oreo and Crayola all offered their take on the memorable scenes from the cult films.

Limerick Day

There once was a brand on Twitter ‘Twas a social heavy hitter They rhymed their Tweets For audience treats And no other brand seemed sweeter Writing short poems is a great way to engage with your followers while showing off your rhyming skills. If you missed Dr. Seuss’s birthday, you’ll have another opportunity to rhyme your heart out on May 12th, also known as Limerick Day. If you’re a little rusty on your limerick-writing skills, you can borrow some ideas from Mick Twister, a famous Twitter limerick poet. He composes daily limericks based on the trending topics on the 140-character network, such as a certain highly contested item of clothing:

If rhyming is just not your forte, you can recruit a Twitter Limerick bot. The bot takes messages from Twitter’s streaming API, counts syllables and identifies potential rhymes, and comes up with a limerick composed of Tweets from different users. Not all of them will make sense, but you can use a couple of lines for inspiration and then tag the users whose Tweets made it into the final version for that extra personal touch. Here’s one generated at my request:

“the past is back to haunt me once again..

Miss being young life was so much easier then!.

OH BOY A MOVIE

I’m feelings my avi

I am never going to drink again“

Talk Like a Pirate Day

Talk like a Pirate Day - holidays to celebrate on social media

While it’s not a reason to go completely off-brand, Talk Like a Pirate Day is a great excuse to switch up your tone, even if you normally tend to stick to the more formal messaging. If you’re not well-versed in pirate vernacular, the official website dedicated to the holiday has all sorts of guides to get you started. If you’re still not confident in your abilities to pull of pirate-speak, make use of some props!

 

To get prepped for this year’s Talk Like a Pirate Day, celebrated on September 19, check out more examples of brands and witty Twitter users having fun with their social media messaging on Talk Like a Pirate Day.

International Coffee Day

coffee - holidays to celebrate on social media

Finally, while your followers may not all be science fiction fans or math buffs, the majority of them probably enjoy a nice cup of joe in the morning. Why not join them in celebrating your shared love for the magical beverage on International Coffee Day on Monday, September 29th? While coffee purveyors draw the most benefit out of Coffee Day, such as launching global brand campaigns as Starbucks did on last year’s holiday, other brands show that you don’t have to be a barista to participate in celebrations.

So in addition to celebrating with a cup of your favorite caffeinated beverage, why not also use the extra kick to craft a couple of Tweets?

Now that you’ve marked your content calendars with these dates, check out these brands who have gone above and beyond when it comes to organizing social media campaigns. And if your campaign draws in a lot of participation from the community, make sure to select the best ones and share them with the rest of your followers. After all, you can never have too much user-generated content!

Do you have any favorite offbeat holidays? Share them with us in the comments below!