Welcome to this week’s quick social media tip. Today I want you to think about how you can tap into cultural trends to create “in-the-moment” marketing.
Tapping into cultural trends is all about marketing in the moment. This works because people are most interested in “what’s happening now.”
Ellen DeGeneres’s 2014 Oscar selfie, retweeted by more than 2.9 million Twitter users fits the scenario of leveraging a cultural trend — the word selfie was crowned Oxford Dictionaries’ Word of the Year in 2013.
Similarly, the #nomakeupselfie campaign, in which women posted pictures of themselves without make-up in order to raise money for cancer research, tapped into the selfie trend. The campaign raised (Stg)£8 million for Cancer Research UK in its first week alone. This campaign wasn’t even the charity’s idea. The organization leveraged a cultural trend that was already sweeping the Internet.
While the Oscar selfie took us by surprise, there are other trends which are more predictable, for example, major sporting events like the Super Bowl in the US, or the World Cup.
Twitter is an obvious place to check what’s trending on a daily basis, but you could also try one of the following tools too:
- Google Trends — filter your search by country, topic, category, specific topic, content type, and more;
- Buzzfeed — its trending section is perfect for searching for hot topics;
- Buzzsumo — search for the most shared web content on a specific topic;
- Reddit — aggregates trending content from all over the internet and shows the hottest (most upvoted) topics on the main page.
Your homework for today – find one trending topic and think about how you can leverage it to create engaging content relevant to your own audience.
Here’s to your social media success!
Health Care Social Media 