Fyreside Newsletter - 5/27*/25

Hey Reader,

You may have noticed that this "every Monday, no matter what" newsletter is hitting your inbox on Tuesday. Those are some impressive observation skills! Good job reader, I'm proud of you.

What I'm not proud of is how many people I saw posting Business Stuff(TM) yesterday. It was a holiday. LOG OFF.

The Big, Dumb Myth

There seems to be a prevalent belief that social media usage SKYROCKETS on holidays. As with most myths, there's certainly something there. If folks aren't at work, they have more time to spend on their devices, I can't argue that. While I can't argue it, there isn't much data to support that point. This article from Exploding Topics includes some of the most comprehensive social data I've been able to find, but it doesn't mention anything about usage rates on certain calendar days. This article from Topdraw discusses the change in social habits around the Holidays (Nov-Dec), but doesn't offer any supporting data.

Despite this staunch lack of data, the broader digital marketing world still loves to push the idea that, even on days off, you should still be posting. But I ask you...

The Real, Actual Reality

Tracking usage data to compare across multiple calendar days would be a MASSIVE undertaking. Some quick numbers to back that up: The average person spends just under 2.5 hours a day on social, and users will spend approximately 4 trillion (yes, with a T) hours on social media this year. There are (currently) 11 federal holidays in the US. If you want to try to distill what percentage of 4 trillion hours falls across 11 calendar days, then attempt to determine how many individual users spent more than 2.5 hours on their apps across those 11 days, be my guest. I'll be over here, pushing a boulder up a hill. (All those numbers are from the Exploding Topics article linked above.)

So, with no concrete data to go on, let's just make some observations. What did you do yesterday? How much time did you spend looking at your phone? Did you go outside? Did you enjoy the weather? Did you tackle a project you saved for the long weekend? Do you see what I'm getting at????

The standard digital marketing advice is "post on holidays because more people are online," but does that even come close to your lived reality? In fact, if you're in the US and not living in Missouri or Iowa, this radar loop tells me you had beautiful weather yesterday! That's 46 of 48 contiguous states' worth of people who had a reason to NOT get online. To just absolutely spell it out for you: no one gives a shit what you post on a holiday.

I'm sorry, I hate to be the one to break it to you, but someone had to. Your audience is not refreshing their feed mindlessly every holiday, hoping your content will save them from their endless scroll. This capitalistic nightmare hellscape that we've built only afford us so many days away from the grind, don't sacrifice them.

When You SHOULD Post on a Holiday

I am of the humble belief that there are exactly 2 reasons to post on socials during a holiday:

You are posting to let people know that you are either closed/open for the holiday
You are posting something about the holiday (e.g. "Happy Labor Day") in which case you should have scheduled your post so you didn't have to log on to post it yourself.

Maybe there's some secret third thing, idk. I'm not going to tell you that you CANT post on the holidays, live your own life. I'm just saying that it probably isn't worth it.

And to the 4 work related messages I got yesterday, I ignored them today and I feel no guilt.