How to Use Trends to Improve Your Social Media Marketing
A trend is a term used to describe the popularity of a topic on a social media platform, like Twitter or TikTok. When a topic becomes popular, it shows up on the platform’s Trending page or Explore area, and gains more impressions, interactions, and mentions than normal. In marketing, trends are valuable tools for finding what’s interesting and catching people’s attention. They can also help marketers plan campaigns that are relevant to current events or popular culture.
The Trending feature on Twitter is an excellent way to stay updated on what topics are popular in your area. It can also be a useful tool for finding new content ideas, as many popular trends can inspire blog posts or other types of online content.
Twitter’s trending topics are determined by what users are discussing and searching for on the platform. The algorithm takes into account the number of searches made for a certain topic, as well as the velocity and direction of the search trend. Trends are typically based on current events or popular culture, but can be anything from celebrity gossip to sports scores.
If you want to make your brand or company the center of a trend, it’s important to be thoughtful and strategic about how you use it. Avoid simply asking followers to “use this hashtag; we want to trend.” Instead, give specific instructions about how to participate, along with the target and time period you’d like. This will ensure that the participation is genuine and doesn’t violate Twitter’s rules against trend abuse, which can lead to account suspension.
It’s important to keep in mind that trends can be temporary, and the topics that are most popular one day may be forgotten the next. As a result, it’s critical to constantly monitor trends and search data to find what’s really resonating with your audience. This can be accomplished by using a social media management tool or going to your own personal dashboards.
Google Trends is another great resource for identifying emerging topics. It’s a free tool that allows you to search for specific terms and see how interest in those terms has changed over time. The downside is that the data can be difficult to interpret and requires a lot of research on your part. The good news is that each trend report includes a thorough explanation of the data behind it, so this is a helpful tool for businesses looking to dig deep into an industry trend.
One other disadvantage of using Google Trends is that the reports are curated by humans rather than by machine learning. This can lead to inaccuracies and a lack of relevance for some industries. That said, Google’s Trends team is always working to improve the quality of the service and make it more relevant to business.