Using Trends to Guide Your Content Strategy
The term “trending” refers to topics that are popular on social media at a given moment. Trends can be driven by a variety of factors, including current events, cultural discussions, viral content, holidays, or even online challenges and campaigns. Trending topics often remain popular for a short period of time.
Using trends to guide your content strategy is important because it allows you to stay updated with what your audience is interested in and engaged with. Additionally, creating content that aligns with ongoing conversations increases its chances of becoming a trend. To get started, it’s important to understand how trends work on different platforms.
Google Trends is one of the most popular tools to identify current trends. It offers a wide range of data and metrics, including search volume, location, and device. It also provides a comparison of popular searches over time and identifies related terms. It is important to note, however, that Google Trends data is based on a sampling of the entire global search population and may not reflect all relevant searches.
Another tool is Buzzsumo, which is used by SEO and content marketers. This platform uses machine learning to scrape articles from a variety of sources and creates an aggregated list of trends. While this tool has a lot of valuable data, it’s not the most efficient way to find trends because you have to manually scan through many articles.
Other tools such as Ahrefs provide a more specific approach to finding trending content. These tools use various metrics to determine if content is in the top 10 for a particular keyword and timeframe. These tools can be more reliable than Google Trends because they provide more accurate results.
While creating trend-inspired content is a great way to gain visibility and engagement on social media, it’s important to remember that trends change quickly. If you don’t keep up with the latest trends, your content will quickly become irrelevant. To ensure that you’re using trending effectively, it’s essential to have a solid understanding of your audience.
Creating content that aligns with the interests and needs of your audience can help you build a more targeted following. Creating timely content that reflects current events and popular culture is a good starting point. Additionally, creating content that incorporates popular hashtags can help your posts reach a wider audience. Finally, leveraging platform features such as Twitter polls or Instagram Stories can increase the visibility of your content and make it more likely to become a trend.