How to Use Trending Topics for Your Business Social Media Success

We’ve all seen those trending topics on different platforms, right? And sometimes you really have to twist your posts into a pretzel shape to use them appropriately. Trending topics can be a godsend if you like to be more spontaneous than scheduled.

Scheduling is Not Spontaneous

If you do like scheduling your posts ahead of time, you might like this post: Automation and Social Media: You Need to Learn to Balance. I recommend that you use a combination of both automation and spontaneous posts to succeed. If you rely upon either only spontaneous or all scheduled posts, you won’t be successful, in my opinion.

Trending Topics on Twitter

Trending Topics on Twitter

On Twitter, trending topics can appear and disappear faster than you can say “Taco Tuesday.” And if you’re tweeting about Taco Tuesday on a Friday, you’ll definitely feel as though you’ve missed the boat! So how do you keep in mind your audience as well as take advantage of a trending topic? Let’s take a look at a few.

Note: Change trending topics for your audience’s location, not yours. So, for example, if your audience is in a different state, then use that location. Because it’s not about you, it’s about them.

https://twitter.com/DarrenKavinoky/status/920766184403845120

Look at the trending topics above. Of the list above, I could probably use #WednesdayWisdom for my audience. When I click through the hashtag, I find the tweet above that might be of interest to my audience. So I’m going to like it and then retweet it.

Tweepsmap and Trending Topics

Tweepsmap and Trending Topics

One of my very favorite ways to see who your audience is and what they care about is to use Tweepsmap.(follow them on Twitter!). You can see the trending topics for your followers, and based upon that, craft tweets to target your biggest groups of followers and what interests them. For instance, based upon the information above, I have more followers in New York than San Francisco, so I should actually look at the trends in New York over those in San Francisco.

Tailor Your Message

Now, based upon what the trending topics are for your audience, you can tailor your posts for what they want to hear about. Again, you can use Tweepsmap to figure this out. Tweepsmap has a category called Intelligent Publishing, where you can see what your followers are talking about, and how they feel about it (not just based upon emojis, but sentiment analysis). The top topic my followers are interested in is #marketing, which is simple enough for me to write about, since that is what I do! So by simply adding the #marketing hashtag to a post, I’ll have tailored that post! Pretty nifty, huh? By the way, you might like this post: Twitter Trending Topics: Secrets for Using Them.

What’s Your Take on Trending Topics?

Do you like them, hate them, or ignore them? Leave me a comment! Thank you!