How to Ride the Trending Topics Wave and Get People to Surf Your Site
Let’s face the facts: it’s incredibly important for businesses to be cognizant of industry trends, such as updates in research, tactics, ad exchanges and more. But what about the world outside of marketing and your industry? What about trending topics in the world of music, sports, and other pop culture and entertainment?
Using these trending topics to your advantage when developing content can help bridge the gap between viral popularity and your brand by engaging readers and creating opportunities for consumers to share, “like” and spread your content.
Why Pay Attention to Trending Topics?
It’s essential to keep up with trending topics in the entertainment world because it not only keeps your content interesting for audiences, but it could potentially increase traffic to your site or social media outlets. This can be credited to two factors: trending topics are intriguing and are also current. Most likely, average web users may not know specific marketing trends but with something entertaining tied to your brand in the world of sports, music and elsewhere, they are more likely to click.
The same principle applies to companies and services. Although audiences may not specifically know your brand or product, they most likely will be able to relate to the trending topic at hand. In the beginning of this year, Facebook implemented popular trending topics on its homepage’s sidebar that when clicked transports users to all pages displaying the topic. Users may not know the Facebook page the topic they are interested in is trending on, but there is a possibility that they will engage in the content provided regarding the trending topic by sharing it on their own page or liking it.
Successful Implementation of Trending Topics
With the buzz created by the World Cup, a few brands have been jumping on the soccer advertising bandwagon. Popular brands Coca Cola, Sony and Pepsi experienced a substantial brand bump with their soccer advertising with Pepi’s increasing 4% and Coke increasing 5%. However, it also doesn’t hurt that Pepsi had a slew of soccer stars in the ad as well.
Another noteworthy event that caused numerous brands to utilize trending topics in their campaign was the Super Bowl XLVII blackout. Big-name brands such as Audi, Oreo, Jim Beam, Volkswagen and Tide all released tweets relative to the incident. The result? Tweets that were just as memorable as the commercials broadcasted that night. By reacting both quickly and with humor, the brands distinguished themselves as trending topic powerhouses for that particular event.
When you’re creating content for your blog or social media like Twitter and Facebook, remember, implementation of entertainment, no matter what the company may be, can be a successful route for engaging different audiences.