How to Take Advantage of Trending Topics: A Brief List of Do’s & Don’t’s

As everyone involved in the fashion world knows, trends and seasons guide the industry. When certain styles are “in,” it’s important to seize the moment and capitalize on those trends while they’re relevant and can help your business. In this way, fashion isn’t so different from marketing your small business online — in fact, your social media presence is highly dependent on 1) what you talk about, and 2) when you talk about it. However, what often flies under the radar is 3) HOW you talk about your topics. And this involves having some know-how about what trends are really lighting up the internet at any given time.

Fortunately, there are many platforms nowadays that you can use to get your company’s message out there, whatever it may be. But among Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and the many other sites you may use, how on Earth do you corral your information into a posts, tweets, and pictures that are pertinent to your business’s message AND relevant to what’s trending?

Don’t get too schedule-happy.

Facebook marketing, Instagram marketing, and many other types of social media outreach all boil down to you, the small-business owner, sitting down and composing bite-sized messages about your business for the public to consume. This used to be a lot harder, but now with such excellent scheduling software out there like Hootsuite, Buffer, and Facebook Scheduler, it can be tempting to take the next free afternoon you have to sit down and schedule out your next month and a half of tweets, posts, and blurbs on your company’s various pages.

However, there’s a danger in doing this: you run the risk of composing messages intended for the future that will soon be outdated or irrelevant (can you remember what everyone was talking about two weeks ago? Me neither). Worse still, you won’t be able to capitalize on certain words or phrases that may be trending on Google at the time the post will “go live,” meaning you’ve missed an opportunity for Search Engine Optimization (SEO– more about that *here* — blog post about SEO linked here.)

Do check on what hashtags are trending.

When something is “trending” on Facebook or Twitter, more people are talking about it, which generally means more people are thinking about it… and are more likely to click on your post. Therefore, being timely and paying attention to which phrases and subjects are on the up-and-up can cause more traffic on your site, which translates to more potential customers and partners. Hooray for paying attention!

Don’t take cheap shots.

This probably goes without saying, but not *everything* that’s trending is fair game for your posts– especially if it has nothing to do with your business. The “Brangelina” split may have the internet in a tizzy, but it’s probably not an appropriate way to garner attention for your company… plus, like all other trends, it will fade and fall out of style, and then you are left scrambling to come up with posts that have more substance. C’mon now. You can do better than that.

Do use Google Trends.

If you’re not sure how to track trends using these tools, click here for a handy how-to.

 
Taking advantage of these trends can help boost your online presence and take your company to a whole new level. If you want to strengthen your social media marketing patterns, looking into these trends will be immensely helpful. Here’s to you and many merry, relevant tweets!