Trends come and go. But the one thing that is eternal is that there will always be someone outside of the marketing department who will ask why you didn’t jump on the latest social media trend.
Is it annoying? Yes. When people who aren’t familiar with brand voice and strategy get really antsy about how you chose not to do a trend, it can put a bug in your plans.
While it’s not great that other people who have no concept of what you do are going to have a say in what you post, it’s better to accept that it’s going to happen and prepare for it. Otherwise, you really will be marketing for their whims rather than what actually works for your social media audience.
So what questions should you ask yourself when a trend comes up?
Does this trend target my audience?
Who is this trend really targeting? Is it moms? Is it teenagers? Maybe someone else? Does that have anything in common with my brand’s audience?
Take for example the trend, “I hate Gay Halloween. What do you mean you’re____?” I love this trend because someone said, “What do you mean you’re Tom Holland’s umbrella from his Lip Sync Battle performance?” I so want to be Tom Holland’s umbrella next year. But I digress…
This trend targets a very particular audience. It’s not for anyone, and it’s not for most brands if we’re being perfectly honest. A general audience doesn’t know what Gay Halloween is, and a post about it will just flop if your brand’s audience doesn’t understand the joke.
So if they don’t understand what is going on, it’s easy to say that you need to skip this one. But if they do…
Can you bring something new to this trend?
It’s great to jump on a relevant trend, but it’s not so great if you’re just going to put out the same thing everyone else is posting. If there is no creative spin on it, it will just be a part of the noise and not stand out in the least. And you just won’t get the benefits out of the trend you might have otherwise.
What does that look like? The Federation of American Scientists jumped on the trend, “We’re ____. Of course we’re gonna _____.” And it did not go at all how I thought it would. They started off the trend happy and go-lucky, but then the next person started going off about nuclear war. And then it cut back to someone else being cheery. And it went back and forth like this. This was posted two years ago, and I still think about it. It hit the trend creatively, and I actually learned something in the process. It was the perfect post that was passed around again and again.
If you can’t bring anything new to the trend, it’s a skip. But if you can…
Has the trend curdled yet?
If you find a trend that works for your audience and you can bring something new to it, you have to move fast. I wish I could tell you when a trend is going to curdle, but it’s different for every one. Sometimes, it sticks with us awhile. But it’s more likely that it’s gonna go bad in twenty four hours.
If you’re wondering how long it’s going to stick around, look at when it started and what the reaction is to the most recent posts. That will give you a good idea about it’s staying power and whether it’s even worth doing at this point. It can take a lot of time to pull a video together at the last minute and a lot of effort to get all of the right components in place. It’s okay to say that you hit it too late, and it’s most likely not worth it at this point.
In the end, you sometimes just have to do it
Look, I would love to say that if all of your answers to the above questions were no, then you shouldn’t do the trend. But that’s not the real world.
In the real world, you have partners and funders who want to feel important and included. It’s okay to say yes solely based on that. Then you just look for ways to minimize the damage to your algorithm work.
I know a lot of people who would just dump something like this on Twitter, because they were just maintaining there and nothing else. So consider which is your least productive network and dump it there if you really think it’s going to disrupt your social media strategy.
Or just let it go and fight a much more important fight on another day. Sometimes that can be the best answer even when it’s infuriating.
How do you decide if you are doing a trend?