What Is a Social Media Trend?
As social media continues to take the world and marketing strategies by storm, brands and companies must keep up with the ever-changing trends and themes that social media perpetuates. If we can understand trends and how they work, we can implement them to fit our goals to impact our audiences and our brand’s image positively.
What Is a Trend?
When considering what a trend is, think of a topic or idea that has increasing popularity at a specific point in time. The key here is time! Trends are temporary, and they change based on what is happening in the world and what is popular on social media at that exact moment. This transient nature is exactly why jumping on trends while they are hot is so crucial to the success of a brand’s social media engagements.
Types of Trends
Trends can come in many different forms and, specifically, often depend on the social media platform you are utilizing. Below are some characteristics of trends on various popular social media platforms.
Instagram is a great place to find trends because it stunts hashtags, reels, and meme-based trends that make a significant impact on audiences, primarily when discovered on the explore page. First, look at this brand that regularly takes advantage of the trending reels! You can also look here to see how brands can take advantage of trending hashtags on Instagram.
X
X trends differ from Instagram trends because they don’t require photo or video content! While you can post graphics, X incorporates hashtags, popular text formats, and trending prompts. Therefore, this is a great place to engage in timely trends quickly with your followers! You can read more about utilizing Twitter trending topics to your advantage here!
TikTok
TikTok is a hub for trending sounds, songs, and actions like dances or quick edits that users put into video content. TikTok is a place where video trends are widely shared, reproduced, and engaged with, so if you have strong film or audio content for your brand, this is a great place to start!
There are also different kinds of trends outside of social media, that are beneficial for brands to pay attention to, such as industry-specific trends that apply directly to your brand’s line of work, or customer-specific trends, such as trending products or services. Here is an excellent example of an industry-specific trend in the film industry!
How Can You Spot a Trend?
Spotting a trend is not always a walk in the park, especially with the timely nature of what is trending. One good way to assess trending content is first to understand the platform that you are looking at. For example, TikTok trends are much easier to come by, as you can simply gauge this by looking at the “Trending” page for inspiration and the popular topics of the day. However, determining trends on Instagram or Twitter is more complex and up to you to interpret. On these platforms, look for widely used hashtags or common memes that often show up in your feed! It is also helpful to listen to your audience or speak to other influencers to gauge what people want to see; the graphic below highlights the most engaging types of content on social media to be aware of. Further, social listening for keywords can also be beneficial to gaining insight into what is trending at that specific time. Finally, it can be helpful for brands to outsource and hire a social media specialist for constant community management of trending topics!
How Can Trends Benefit YOUR Brand?
Learning how to utilize trends to your advantage can greatly boost your brand’s social media presence. Trends are a great way to get engaged with your audience and show them information in a way that is interesting and relevant to them and the social media environment that they are experiencing every day. Specifically, trends can be essential to interacting with a millennial audience, many of whom grew up using social media and experience the passing trends every day. You can click here to read further on how millennials are great audience members to get engaged with your brand, especially through using content that is trending for the demographic.
All in all, trends allow brands to tap into the lives of their followers through the use of common material, which is ultimately essential to increasing engagements and interactions in the long-term. So, get started looking for trends on your brand’s social media platforms! You can even click here to see some Instagram-specific trends for the year 2022 to get you started!
