Business and trends often go hand in hand, but for many the idea of capitalizing on trends within social media and the various social networks often gets neglected or even overlooked all together! The immediacy of events taking place within your social circle can lend itself to opportunities that you might otherwise miss if you’re not actively monitoring relevant trends within your industry.
Trends & Traffic
It’s been said that traffic is the lifeblood of a website, and by capitalizing on trending topics you can quickly and efficiently get yourself, your company, or your product in front of that traffic by tailoring your marketing message to the various trends taking place at any given time.
By staying abreast of current events within your industry it’s easy to tailor your blog posts, tweets, or updates to address the issues that people are actively listening, and paying attention to. In the beginning of all situations or events there is a period of time where little information can be found online and by simply offering up your opinions, or even solutions to an issue you can find yourself rewarded by a flood of traffic that while short lived can be quite substantial.
Trends & Sales
When singer/song writer Dave Carroll looked out his United Airlines aircraft window in time to witness baggage handlers throwing (and subsequently damaging) his prized Taylor guitar he likely didn’t foresee the twelve million plus views his video response to United would generate.
Carlton Cases, however, who were monitoring the situation via social media were able to quickly capitalize on the situation by creating a special edition “Dave Carroll Signature” case and offering it for sale at a time when the music world was paying close attention and effectively drive sales in real time.
Trendy Tools
Google Trends – using Google trends you can view the historical and trending search patterns of millions of users performing billions of searches each and every month. Using this data businesses are tailoring campaigns to what people are actively seeking online.
In the search below for the term “new car” it’s easy to spot the jump in searches at the beginning of 2009 which coincides with the tax break that rolled out that same year.
#Hashtags – are a Twitter tool that helps to separate the 200+ million tweets sent each day. By using Twitter search to locate the categories that apply to your business you can quickly and easily see what topics you might be able to capitalize on.
Getting in front of a social media trend isn’t always easy, but with a little bit of effort and perhaps some creativity on your part you should be able to track down and take advantage of one or two trending topics each month and the resulting sales and traffic that funnel in as a result should be incentive enough for you to keep up the effort!
