Social Media Day: What it means to social marketers and how to celebrate

The year was 2010. The era of chunky necklaces, flower crowns and technicolor skinny jeans. Tumblr was the birthplace of trends and culture. Millennials ruled the headlines. And it was the year Pete Cashmore, former Mashable CEO, first coined “Social Media Day.” Incidentally, it was also the year Sprout Social was founded.

Fourteen years ago, the role social media played in our lives was drastically different. It was primarily seen as a way to connect with friends and family. Text updates, relationship statuses and hyper-filtered photos were the extent of our feeds. Few could imagine the way social would inundate our daily lives in the next decade.

But that was beginning to change. Some brands were getting on board with social and scaling their presence. Emerging businesses were leveraging platforms like X (formerly Twitter), Facebook and the new Instagram app to get off the ground. The year marked a turning point: It was the first time companies realized social might actually be the future of marketing.

Today, social has become the place for discovering new trends, following influencers and creators, researching brands and shopping. Naturally, that puts it at the center of many brands’ overall marketing strategies, positioning social teams at the helm of a critical, cross-functional operation.

This Social Media Day, let’s celebrate all that the people behind brand accounts have achieved. Here are ways other social marketers are marking the occasion, and ideas your brand can use to follow suit.

What is Social Media Day?

Every June 30th, Social Media Day recognizes social media's impact on global communication and culture at large.

Cashmore originally introduced the hashtag holiday to celebrate how social media has altered communication channels and media.

As Cashmore said in our Social Media Day-focused episode of Enter the Chat, “It’s hard to remember that [before the 2010s] it was TV that shaped culture…On the Social Media Day, we took social media into ‘real life.’ That was the origin of Social Media Day: Letting people around the world connect around their love of social media.

In that period, there was a lot of optimism about social media empowering people to have a voice. Today, we’ve forgotten we didn’t use to be so empowered to tell our own side of the story. There were so many gates to media. If you wanted to be interviewed, you had to go on a mainstream talkshow. Now, you can put your own narrative out into the world.”