Special Days for Social Media Posts

We all know of the usual special days of the year - New Year's Day, Mother's Day, Valentine's Day and so on. But did you know there are many, many more? And these days can be the perfect prompt for your next social media activity.

How about an Instagram photo promoting Purple Day to raise awareness and money for epilepsy? Or a tweet celebrating the International Women's Day? Or how about a blog post discussing one of these topics?

Why use Special Days?

Recognising special days has a number of benefits to an author:

• Show what causes are important to you as an individual and they can become part of your branding
• Help a good cause by using your author platform to spread the word
• Take advantage of the prompt to give you an interesting and useful topic to share on social media

How to use Special Days?

Take a look at the special days. You can do a quick search and find many sites that list all the special days of the year. Then add the days that interest you to your social media and/or blogging calendar. Prepare and schedule your posts across various platforms in advance.

You can use the opportunity to promote the cause or interest - 'sharing is caring' after all - but there are some days that are perfect to use for your book marketing.

Special Days - writing related

Some special days are created with authors in mind. Just this month alone there are the following:

• World Book Day - 1st March
• Read Across America Day - 2nd March
• National Grammar Day - 4th March
• National Proofreading Day - 8th March
• World Storytelling Day - 20th March

What a great opportunity to create some awesome blog posts on these topics.

Special Days for Book Promotion

You can leverage seemingly random special days. How about using World Chocolate Day or International Chocolate Day to share your love of chocolate and how chocolate powers up your writing? Or National Flatmate Day to talk about your book featuring housemates, or Kiss Your Fiance Day to share the first kiss of the couple in your romance story?

Word of warning - some days are a bit of fun but others have been created for special and important purposes. Make sure you are aware of what the day is truly about and only leverage the day if it can be used respectfully.

When?

Whenever you want! There is a special day nearly every day of the month and some dates have more than one special day. There are also special months.

Tips

1. Take note of the warning above - use the special day appropriately
2. Don't forget to use the specific hashtags assigned to the day
3. Search on the hashtag if you want to get some inspiration from what others have posted in the past
4. Leverage social media sharing services that prompt you with reminders for upcoming days and suggestions for posts. I use PromoRepublic.
5. For some days the actual date changes each year. For example, the designated day may be the first Tuesday of the month and so will change every year

Hopefully I'll start seeing some fun book related posts associated with special days in the future.

Happy writing and promoting,

Nicki x