When marketing your brand, social media trends is a very big part of your strategy and campaign. Creating a social media campaign is important to look at your company’s brand, their goals and the timeline as to when you want to achieve those goals.
Trends can be a nifty tool to help you get your brand out there, be it using an existing trend to your brands advantage or to create a brand new trend from scratch.
Past trends that brands used to their advantage:
ALS Ice Bucket Challenge: By creating a hashtag and attaching a challenge to it, the organization was able to create awareness and a lot of funds for the research and treatment of this illness.
Cape Town Fires: With these horrible fires that broke out in Cape Town we had many firefighters and volunteers working hard to save our beautiful Peninsula. Brands jumped on the band wagon as these brave souls needed supplies; like water and food. When people donated supplies and money, they posted on social media platforms with the trending hashtag.
One Direction: When One Direction came to South Africa, Twitter and Facebook went crazy with girls swooning at the sound of their names, to the self harm inflicted when they found out that Zayn Malik was leaving the group. Companies were shamelessly punting their brands online with the various hashtags that were trending that week. And it worked.
How to stay on top of trends:
- Trendsmap: To stay on top of current trends on Twitter you can try this site. It alerts you on current trending hashtags on any location around the world. Although this tool is free it will only give you minimal information whereas the paid version will offer you more options.
- Trending topics feature on Facebook: This feature is quite new and very helpful when deciding what engagement boosting post you want to create.
- Google Trends: The Google search bar is an amazing thing. All you do is type in “What is trending today?” and it will generate whatever is going on in the world. It will even give you trending hashtags extracted from Twitter.
