It can often feel like a new social trend peaks every minute. But not every trend will have a lasting significance or relevance on your business—marketers must be able to uncover what’s trending and decide what’s worth investing time and resources into.
But first, it’s crucial to build your understanding of trends. TikTok has developed a framework for understanding three distinct types of trends:
- Forces: Long-lasting trends that reflect long-term cultural shifts impacting everyone on the internet.
- Signals: Trends that signify greater cultural shifts in particular demographics and communities that last a few years.
- Moments: Trends that grab attention and resonate with existing customers for a few days, weeks or months.
Ruppert of LinkedIn Australia suggests brands develop a trend profile that best serves their business goals. This means saying “no” to a lot of trends that will not serve your brand in the long term, no matter how viral those trends might be.
“I strongly advise against jumping on every trend for the sake of it. This comes across as insincere,” Rupper suggests. “Savvy, social-native audiences do not hesitate to call out a brand that seems like it’s trying too hard to be relevant.”
You can designate team members as dedicated trend spotters to develop a robust trend profile. Even seasoned marketers need to do trendspotting from time to time to immerse themselves in changing consumer sentiments in a way that enables them to create truly relevant content.
Use social listening to surface the trends relevant to your audience, and look at social data to understand which trends may have a business impact. “Follow enough topics on social media to understand if a repurposed piece of content will make it to the FYPs,” explains Diogo Martins, Bloomr.SG Lead at Mediacorp. “Consider not only the topic but also the way a specific social platform works.”
Martins points out that they have the benefit of “multiple content producers at Mediacorp” working with Bloomr.SG to follow trends. “When we observe a trend emerging, we can usually discern if it will gain traction in the Singapore market, indicating that it would be prudent for us to embrace it from a client-serving perspective,” he says.
Social listening proved to be very effective for Macquarie University’s Munro Smith in 2022 when they wanted to promote their university’s course outcomes. At the time, the Little Miss trend (a meme template using characters from an illustrated children’s book series called Mr. Men) was making the rounds on social media.
Munro Smith and the team decided to ride that trend and create branded assets related to their course outcomes.
“The audience loved it,” Munro Smith recalls. “The series became some of our most saved pieces of content for 2022. We had a flurry of DMs from alumni and the in-feed comments were overly positive.”
Munro Smith suggests that teams collectively decide what trends to pursue and create a strategy from there. “Our weekly standup begins with the team all sharing what content they were seeing on their socials. As a group we then discuss how this could be used in our context (aligned to our content pillars) and then we vote for those we think are worth exploring,” he says.
Afterward, you need to plan a follow-up. “Be ready to keep going. A trend without follow-up is a waste of resources. Never just trend and disappear,” says Munro Smith.
