As we enter the peak holiday season, we thought it would be a great time to share our latest Random Labs experiment, which explores one of the most common marketing dilemmas: Does posting on holidays decrease performance?
Specifically, we are analyzing whether posting content during these holidays impacts both content and channel metrics to identify any cause and effect from a holistic perspective. We will analyze our content across Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn to determine any significant impact of holiday posts on performance and growth.
Looking back at the 2024-2025 content, we decided to include eight holidays in our analysis, selecting four federal holidays and four observances to provide a broader range.
| Holiday | Month | Type |
| Christmas (Winter Greetings) | December | Federal |
| Halloween | October | Federal |
| Thanksgiving | November | Federal |
| New Years | January | Federal |
| Earth Day | April | Observance |
| International Women's Day | March | Observance |
| World Kindness Day | November | Observance |
| Mental Health Awareness | May | Observance |
Having pinpointed these eight holidays throughout the year, we will evaluate content performance and potential channel-wide effects across three platforms. This will enhance our multivariate analysis by revealing whether certain platforms have a higher affinity for specific holidays (or holiday content in general).
The following percentage heat map was created to evaluate content from various holidays and observances against overall monthly post performance:
Although the output contains substantial numerical data, the interpretation is straightforward. The percentages indicate performance differences between posts related to specific holidays or observances and the monthly content average for their respective months. For instance, our Facebook post achieved 447% higher engagement and 36% higher views than the content average for December, the month in which that post appeared. Vice versa, negative percentages indicate that the holiday or observance content scored lower than the average monthly posts for each metric and platform.
When evaluating our output, the results were extremely typical of what we see daily, even for non-holiday posts: a lot of variation. For instance, we observed a slightly higher positive lift in count across Meta channels compared to LinkedIn. However, some of LinkedIn's extremely high lifts (over 100%) resulted from individual holiday posts significantly outperforming that month’s overall content. The spread of positive and negative percentage lifts likely indicates that there isn’t enough evidence to suggest that the holidays themselves are the determining factor behind content performance - especially when we start looking at the type of content itself.
So does posting on holidays decrease performance? Not inherently.
As mentioned before, in some months, especially around New Year’s, we saw one of our relatively higher-performing pieces of content, while in other months, we fell short in comparison to other non-holiday content. The performance of holiday content is likely dictated by the same factors as any other content—primarily content relevance, content type, audience activity levels, individual platform algorithms, and other contextual variables.
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