Trends come and go sooner than you realize. If you want to take advantage of a social media trend, you need to act fast. Digital growth depends a lot on how quickly you can adapt to change. Whether it’s a new TikTok audio or an app that pops up overnight (yes we’re thinking Threads) – if everyone is doing it, your business needs to use it.
Staying on top of trends doesn’t just mean knowing what is popular. You also need to be able to measure the value it adds. Numbers do matter, after all. Even when it comes to making silly videos for your social media accounts.
Not sure how to keep up with ever changing trends? Here’s your guide.
Follow industry leaders and influencers
You may miss a trend here and there but that doesn’t mean every influencer and expert in your niche will miss it. Following other influencers helps in more ways than one. Their full time job is to keep up with what’s trending and execute it in their own way, you can use their research to your advantage.
Following these accounts will make relevant content keep popping up on your news feed naturally. Once you are subconsciously consuming so much relevant and diverse content, you will stop having to go out of your way to ‘keep up’. Better yet, you will have a constant inflow of creative ideas.
Start saving all the videos you like in a separate folder and revisit them whenever your social media strategy is being discussed. Why think alone when thousands of people are already thinking along the same lines? Work smart!
“Edutainment” content is all the rage
Edutainment is exactly what the name suggests: entertaining educational content. Consumers prefer useful and fun posts, because it fulfills their need for productivity and their want for entertainment. Create a balance between both and your social media will start booming.
The point is to create thoughtful and useful content, which will urge people to ‘save’ them for later. Social media algorithms have already started valuing saves more than likes or comments.
Short form videos with some humor and some education – that’s the recipe you need. This is why educational content is what most marketers prioritize when looking for creators to work with.
When it comes to text heavy posts, you can make them more catchy by making them more aesthetic to look at. For a quick fix you can make your pick from the thousands of image and video templates on PosterMyWall.
Use social media monitoring tools
You need to understand the nitty gritty of social media to be able to respond to trends. You’ll find dozens of tools online to track social media trends and see how well your posts are performing. Here are a few to get you started:
- Google Trends is a great way to monitor trending topics. You can even set up alerts for certain keywords you want to keep an eye out for.
- Tweet Deck is a free tool to keep tabs on specific hashtags. Tweet Deck is limited to Twitter only.
- Hootsuite is a great way to monitor trends across different social media platforms at the same time. Whether it’s just a single hashtag or multiple trending topics, it’s a useful tool to invest in.
Before you start getting involved in complicated softwares, make sure you know how to monitor in-app analytics as well. Instagram and Facebook offer account insights which are easy to understand and quite useful to understand your audience. You can figure out where most of your audience is from, what age groups they belong to, and what posting times get you the best engagement.
Experiment with new features
Trends aren’t all about TikTok audios and dancing videos – some trends revolve entirely around new features. These features can be built into the app itself or can be downloaded as a separate app. Whatever the case is, if everyone’s doing it then you need to jump onto the bandwagon.
A perfect example of this is how Instagram launched Threads. Even though it is really similar to Twitter, it was trending so everyone joined in immediately. Brands started posting off the bat, and fast movers felt a sense of importance that the late comers didn’t get to enjoy. A trend is only valuable to your online presence when you follow it during its peak time.
Not sure whether you’re up to date with the trends that are useful to your account? Follow a few competitors to view things from a consumer’s perspective. They have similar audiences and need to carry out the same research that you need to. Use this to your advantage. Learn from their mistakes as well as their successes, but that doesn’t mean stop doing anything on your own!
Video content dominance
Gradually all social media platforms are becoming extremely video focused. This change makes sense as people engage the most with video.
Even though Instagram started off as a photo sharing platform, reels have now become a staple. You can’t expect to grow on Instagram if you don’t make reels. The same way you can’t expect to grow on TikTok unless you use trending audios and ideas.
It’s not just video content, it’s short form video content that is doing numbers. A 7 second funny video might perform better than a 1 minute professionally shot video and that’s just the way it is. If you think about it, most trends are in video form. Whether it’s the age-old ice bucket challenge or a TikTok dance routine – videos always make the cut for fun content.
Wrapping it up
If you consume enough of social media, it’s only a matter of time and you’ll know about a trend before it even gets labeled as one. To make things work the key is consistency. Posting, scrolling, monitoring and even creating content, it all needs to be spaced evenly. In a way that people always expect to see something on your socials. If your audience looks forward to your posts, that’s when you know you’re doing things right.
Social media trends are super fun to keep up with, make sure you enjoy the process! For more insight, check out these relevant blog posts:
- 4 creative contest promotion ideas for your social media
- How to launch a social listening strategy (tools and best practices)
- Understanding audience intent on social media
Anoosha is a digital marketer and content writer at PosterMyWall. From writing to painting and everything in between, she loves experimenting with creative work. In her free time Anoosha works on her fashion and lifestyle blog!
