Holidays are golden opportunities that you can use to market your brand and its products or services. According to data revealed by Statista, in 2021, Christmas retail sales in the US alone were expected to add up to over $843 billion. Though, when you’re creating your own social media content calendar, Christmas is by far not the only holiday event that you should add. From quirky events like National Ice Cream Day to more serious days like National Cancer Survivors Day, there are numerous official and unofficial days that you can include in your holiday marketing campaigns.
Celebrating social media holidays can help your brand to improve its organic reach and drive more engagement, especially if you combine it with a relevant hashtag or two. Plus, it can also give you more ideas for social media posts and other types of content. Depending on the event, it can possibly be turned into a chance to share more about your company culture or mission, helping you to increase brand awareness and ultimately connect on a deeper level with your target market.
Whether it’s simply by sending holiday emails to preview your upcoming sale or something more interactive like launching a contest or treating your followers to a giveaway, there are many ways that you can include these dates on the calendar in your social media strategy. It can also be a great opportunity to encourage followers to send user-generated content.
To help you create your own marketing calendar, here are eight of the best free social media holiday calendars that you can check out. Some of them merely list a bunch of events, while others give you the option to sync it with your Google Calendar. We’ve also highlighted a few of the most interesting events, though, be sure to look at the actual templates for many more ideas and important dates.
8 Free Social Media Holiday Calendars
1. Sprout Social
If hashtags play a big role in your marketing strategy, be sure to check out Sprout Social’s holidays and awareness days resource where they’ve gathered all the top hashtags for 2022. While it’s not a downloadable template, they’ve added them into a Google Calendar with extra awareness days and holidays.
Some of the interesting and popular hashtags that they’ve added to their calendar include:
- January 14: #DressUpYourPetDay ?
- February 17: #NationalRetroDay
- March 26: #EarthHour
- April 22: #EarthDay
- May 4: #MayThe4thBeWithYou
- June 8: #BestFriendsDay ?♀️
- July 24: #NationalTequilaDay
- August 26: #WomensEqualityDay
- September 6: #ReadABookDay ?
- October 31: #Halloween ?
- November: #Movember
- December: #HumanRightsMonth
2. Hootsuite
Hootsuite has created a social media holiday calendar for 2022 that you can add to your Google Calendar. All you need to do is click on the “+” icon in the bottom right-hand corner of the calendar and give permission to add the social media holidays to your Google Calendar. Alternatively, if you don’t want to crowd your Google Calendar with too many absurd events that you’ll never include in your content marketing strategy, you can simply bookmark the calendar and return to it at the beginning of each month.
Some of the interesting events that they’ve added to their calendar include:
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3. Sociality
Sociality has dubbed their calendar The Definite 2022 Holiday Calendar that you can add to your Google Calendar or download as an .ics file and add it to the calendar that you prefer.
Some of the interesting events that they’ve added to their calendar include:
Read More4. Emplifi
Emplifi is a unified customer experience (CX) platform that helps brands to meet the expectations of their customers. Since they started, they’ve monitored over 28 million social profiles. So, when it comes to what works on social media, they’re definitely a reliable source.
One of the useful features of Emplifi’s free social media holiday calendar is that they also include a short sentence about the event. This is very useful as the last thing you want is to mistake an event for something else. Sadly, they don’t give you the option to sync it with your Google Calendar or download it in PDF format, though.
Some of the interesting events that they’ve added to their calendar include:
Read More5. Insense
Insense is a creative platform that helps brands to launch social marketing campaigns and create custom creative assets. It’s also a great place where advertisers can find creators. While their free social media holiday calendar that they share on their blog doesn’t have as many events as some of the others, they include some content ideas along with a short description of the event.
Some of the interesting events that they’ve added to their calendar include:
Read More6. SocialBee
SocialBee is one of the Social Media Scheduling Tools and, as you would expect, they also share a detailed social media calendar template as a lead magnet on their marketing blog. All you need to do to download it is to type in your email address. The downloadable template is shared in Google Sheets format making it easy to save to your Google Drive.
Some of the interesting events that they’ve added to their calendar include:
Read More7. Status Brew
Status Brew is a comprehensive social media management tool. Not only do they support all the main social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube), but also Google My Business.
On their marketing blog, they share a 2022 Social Media Holiday Calendar. While you can’t download their social media holiday calendar as they boldly claim, it’s still a pretty useful list. They’ve summarized the main holiday events per month which you can use to compare to your template. Another handy feature is that they’ve also listed the main hashtag associated with a particular holiday.
Some of the interesting events that they’ve added to their calendar include:
Read More8. Later
Whether you’re a small business owner or social media manager, Later’s free social media holiday calendar is one of our top picks. It’s mainly aimed at the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Not only is it colorful, but it’s also downloadable. So, if you don’t necessarily want to integrate it with your own personal Google Calendar, be sure to check out their calendar. The only downside is that you need to part with your email address.
Some of the interesting events that they’ve included on their social media content calendar are:
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Wrapping Things Up
While these calendars will save time, it’s important not simply to copy and paste all the dates to your marketing calendar. Remember that not every holiday on the calendar will relate to your target audience. There are many random holidays that have been created and several of them are quite laughable like National Clean Off Your Desk Day and National Greasy Foods Day. Even the humble paperclip has its own national day in May.
So, you’ll have to sieve through the events included on the different calendar templates and narrow it down to the ones that your target audience will find relevant. Don’t fall into the trap of creating content for every event.
Also, some days might mark multiple holidays. For example, the 15th of January is both National Hat Day and National Bagel Day. In this case, it’s best to focus on only one holiday. Once again, let your target market guide you and select the one that they will resonate with more.
