Happy Yom Kippur: Doing Holidays Wrong
By Sarah Rushakoff
Acknowledging holidays is a great way to connect with your audience, especially when the theme is on-brand for your organization! You don’t have to stick to the most well-known celebrations, either. If you look around online, you’ll find lists of obscure holidays for every occasion. Make sure you understand the origins of the special dates you choose to highlight. With the fast pace of creating and publishing social media posts, it’s easy to get things… not quite right… and sometimes you can get it really, really wrong.
Religious Holidays
The importance of different religious holidays depends heavily on where your company operates, or where your customer base is. I live and work in Memphis, where church-based holidays like Christmas and Easter are a very big deal, even for people who don’t consider themselves religious. When I lived in Brooklyn, I noticed that many schools and businesses also had the day off for big Jewish holidays like Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. I was astonished—and a little jealous! Growing up in Memphis, I always had to ask off for those!
Anyway, for holy days, even ones that have been secularized, it’s a good idea to find out a little about them before building a post around them. For example, the title of this blog post hints at this kind of oversight. Yom Kippur is a day of fasting and atonement, so appropriate greetings are more solemn than celebratory. A quick Google search can give you an idea of how you should approach—or not approach—any unfamiliar holiday.
Government-recognized Holidays
I follow a bunch of animal influencers on Instagram. Bunnies, cats, dogs, chinchillas. Anything soft and cute is on the list. Stay with me, I’m going somewhere with this. I actually got the idea to write this article from a major misstep I saw one of these accounts make on Martin Luther King Jr. Day earlier this year. The person who runs the account decided to feature a portrait of their pet with a quote about how it “had a dream” of treats and toys. After a little while, and plenty of comments letting them know it was deeply uncool, they quietly took the post down.
There are also some government holidays that can be delicate because they commemorate a historical figure or event not universally admired. For dates like Memorial Day, Labor Day, or Juneteenth, you might benefit from more mindful messaging than just the announcement of a blowout sale. If your business will be closed because of a federal, state, or local holiday, or you simply want to recognize a lesser-known date, invest a little time figuring out if your vibe should be light and celebratory, solemn and serious, or more matter-of-fact.
Silly, Themed Holidays
A fun way to get out of a content rut! There are “holidays” for almost everything. Where did they all come from? Who knows. Some of my favorite examples are “Talk Like a Pirate Day” and “International Owl Awareness Day” (September 19 and August 4, respectively). When I searched, I found multiple holidays SPECIFICALLY ABOUT SOCKS. Even though they are fun and silly, it’s still a good idea to do a light poking-around into these seemingly random celebrations to make sure they don’t source from somewhere unsavory.
You can never please everybody, but you can try your best not to alienate your followers and customer base. Use good judgment and communicate often with your clients and/or team to ensure you’re making the best decisions possible! Have fun, and make every day “Make Up Your Own Holiday Day” (March 26, for the record).