October 26, 2018 Vance Moore

Specific hashtags: Hashtagging, in general, is a long-term trend that is still growing, but specific hashtags that relate to current issues and events are acute trends (such as #ice bucket challenge).
Facebook pages: A single Facebook page may experience bursts of popularity due to a viral post.
Website pages: Single pages can skyrocket into the spotlight, such as if a new product comes out. Sometimes, entire websites do the same.
Blog posts: Articles that shed light on a relevant topic or share strong opinions often attract a lot of attention and garner a lot of engagement and discussion in the comments section.
Video: Bold and relevant videos spark the interest of society. Funny videos are also major contenders.

Longer-Term

There are different types of long-term trends, including:

Year trends: considered “in” …but just for the year.
Industry trends: as the name suggests, specific to certain industries.
Audience trends: have to do with the inclinations or habits of a specific audience.
Fashion trends: Some are good, others are bad. Some make people glad when they’re revived. Others come back in style when they never should’ve been in style in the first place……but back to marketing. There’s a Billion-dollar question that needs answering.

How Can You Leverage Trends for Marketing?

The first thing you need is a toolbox. What tools should you have inside? Consider two important ones that you can’t go without.

Tool #1: Social Media

Advertisements

Many of the fads mentioned above are intertwined with social media. Facebook is a social network. Hashtags are used mainly on social networks. And often, when websites, web pages, blog posts and videos shoot to fame, a lot of the hype is on social media.

If you want to spotlight your brand or anything related to it, being active on social media will increase your chances. Too, you can get a better idea of what it will take to help you reach that goal. By paying attention to what people are most interested in or concerned about, you can improve your posts and position your business cleverly.

What hashtags are being widely used right now? How can you use them in a way that makes sense for your industry and audience? What are some common threads between recent trending web pages, videos and so on? Can those same methods work for you? Social media is the place to engage, observe, gather, adjust, and engage, again and again.

Tool #2: Google Trends

This handy tool allows you to search for key terms and see whether their popularity has increased or decreased over time. Obviously, you wouldn’t want to waste energy, time and resources “riding the wave” of a dying craze. You want to get in on the action early on or at the peak of popularity.

Using this tool together with others (or with your ear to the ground that is social media), you can choose the right trends to join in on.

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