April Fools’ Day: A day for pranks, jokes, and a little mayhem. Some people take the day to play a cruel joke or two on their loved ones (mayonnaise in the toothpaste tube, anyone?) while others watch from afar.

Here at Lemonly, we always like to join in on the fun of April Fools’ because that’s just part of who we are. We’re serious when it comes to our business, but we’re not afraid to have a little fun.

In the past, we pitched things like a new branch of Lemonly in Mumbai (Limely) and a new 24/7 livestream of our HQ to help promote transparency.

This year, we started to think about what our joke would be mid-March rather than on March 31 at 10 PM. While brainstorming, our developer and content idea extraordinaire, Michael Todd, remembered the success of our CEO John’s Facebook post about needing someone to redesign the new South Dakota license plates.

How could we resist? Michael enlisted the help of our designer Brett Hanes to create a mockup of a new South Dakota license plate between projects. To help add to the fun and help people realize this was a joke (and show our love for the Broadway show Hamilton), we also decided to add the plot twist of placing Alexander Hamilton’s head on Mount Rushmore, even though he wasn’t a president.

After making the plate design, animating a “wink” in it to add to the April Fools’ playfulness, and writing the “story” (read it here) we were ready to rock ‘n’ roll. At around 9:30 AM on April 1, we posted the story to our social channels. After doing so, here’s what we learned:

1. People are passionate about license plates.

Little did we know that our Facebook post would spread around the state so quickly! At the end of the day on Facebook alone, we reached over 30,000 people organically, had over 6,ooo post clicks, and over 900 reactions, comments, and shares.

2. There are four heads on Mount Rushmore.

Just kidding. We knew that. Though we had a few people that didn’t read the post think we intentionally put a fifth head on the design. :/

3. People just read headlines, even on April Fools’ Day.

Though it’s evident on social media that many people don’t investigate things before sharing them, on April Fools’ Day especially, we encourage people to click the story and read what they’re sharing before they share it. 😉

4. Governor Daugaard’s son is a good sport

Best tweet of the day was from Governor Daugaard’s son, Chris. In the section of the blog post where we talked about adding Alexander Hamilton to the plate, we “quoted” the Governor with this fictitious quote:

“My son was hip-hopping one day, and I could not make heads or tails of it,” Gov. Daugaard said. “I asked him, ‘Son, what are you even saying?’ He says, ‘Pops, I’m Alexander Hamilton!'”

To that, we got this tweet from Chris:

Ten points for playing along, Chris.

5. There’s a need for some license plate redesign (and not just in SD)

One of my favorite parts about our posts were the pleas from other people asking to redesign their state’s plate. In the Facebook post, we had requests to redesign plates for North Dakota, Nebraska, and Delaware, too. (Maybe we open a new license plate design firm?)

We’d love to thank everyone for the kind words about the plate design, whether you believed it or not. We definitely had fun creating this joke and hope you all enjoyed in the end.

While we weren’t actually named the new 2022 plate designers, we’re very open to the possibility. Let’s cross our fingers for that.