Stop me if you've seen this trend before

Here it goes again.

The internet used to be simple.

Something would happen. Something nice and easy. And then that would be all we talked about for the rest of the day.

Ed Balls tweets “Ed Balls”, and that’s your week sorted. Nothing else is getting done. Everyone tweets their own name out. This carries on and becomes an annual tradition. Each year from then on, #EdBallsDay trends on Twitter. Five years later, Ed Balls bakes a cake of his own tweet.

But things have changed. Trends don’t happen like they used to. And this represents a challenge for us brand marketers. How do you know which trends to jump on and when? If social media isn’t very social anymore, where does that leave us?

Buckle up; we’re chatting trends. And there will be graphs.

We used to know what was trending.

If Twitter was the Town Square of the internet, then Trending Topics was its bulletin board. A realtime list of things everyone is talking about at any particular moment. But Trending Topics didn’t just report on trends. It caused them.

It turned a trend (small t - an organic upswell of conversation) into a Trend (big T - a proper named thing). And once a Trend existed, you could engage with it.

Other channels worked in similar ways, too. There wasn’t always the equivalent of Trending Topics, but Reddit has its front page; Tumblr told you what was trending. The important thing is that trends were public & shared. My trends were your trends; we were looking at the same ‘trend space’.

When I created #PigGate content, you knew exactly what I was talking about (what a day that was).

Here’s a graph I used to show folks to explain when the ‘best time to join in on a meme’ was:

There was value in being the first to jump on a trend. Oreo famously popularised realtime marketing with their ‘dunk in the dark’ tweet during the Superbowl blackout in 2013. And that led to a frantic decade of trend-chasing, always wanting to get in on something while it was “hot”.

Lots of clever folks wrote about how to master ‘reactive content. ' Why, here’s one such example right here:

But today, things feel different. What’s trending today? I… don’t know? Uh-oh.

We’ve lost all visibility on trends.

Twitter is dying. There goes the Town Square of the Internet.

But even if it wasn’t, Trending Topics on Twitter don’t look like they used to. Hit Explore on Twitter, and you’ll be greeted by a personalised list of things Twitter thinks you might be interested in.

Are these the things being talked about most on Twitter right now? Nope! Heading to Trending tells a different story.

My trends are broadly tech- and politics-related, but what’s actually trending right now is Sports. What gives?

Social media platforms used to be obsessed with giving you NEW content. News feeds were chronological, and you were hooked by the constant prospect of fresh content. But for whatever reason (oh hey, data-driven product development), platforms flipped the script. They started giving you RELEVANT content - irrespective of when it was posted. As we all know, news feeds have become algorithmic.

Twitter does this by defaulting to For You over Following. Instagram does this by hiding its chronological feed under a drop-down option. Oh, and there’s a little platform called TikTok that doesn’t even bother with the concept of linear time at all.

What this all means is that there’s no Town Square. We’re each the sole occupant of our own Town Square, being fed our own Bulletin Board by the powers that be. My internet is not your internet. And my trends are not your trends.

As internet culture king Ryan Broderick puts it:

TikTok is like if Reddit's subreddits were invisible and constantly being created specifically for you.

Everything trending everywhere all at once.

“What’s trending?” is now an impossible question to answer. Here’s a selection of articles about things that were trending on TikTok on a single day.

I was blissfully aware of all these until I sought these articles out. Particularly bone smashing. Please do not smash my bones, your bones, or anyone else’s bones. Bones are not meant for smashing, thank you.

The internet is a morass of overlapping platforms and micro-communities. Sure, you could engage with the moon phase soulmate trend on your brand account, but why? The advice of engaging with trends falls apart when trends are simultaneously so numerous but dispersed.

Some trends still become so big they’re worth engaging with - like the recent Roman Empire thing. But the feeling I get when staring down the barrel of trend reports these days is just… ugh.

I don’t have an answer to this, by the way. I’m just stating problems. The answer is probably something about engaging with communities directly via micro-creators in those niches. But all answers very welcome.

That trend you like is going to come back in style.

Another weird consequence of the new landscape of trends is that the lifecycle of a trend looks different. The graph I shared above was basically one of diminishing returns over time - you gotta get in early before irrelevance sets in. Nobody is making Ice Bucket Challenge videos in 2023.

But I’ve seen an increasing second wind effect happening for trends, particularly video templates and sounds on TikTok. There’ll be a first wave of the trend, but then it’ll hit another corner of the platform a few months later, and so on. And so things do become relevant again.

Here’s what the lifecycle looks like today:

So, it’s more a case of things coming in and out of relevance. The example that sparked this idea was the 'Surprise Surprise’ meme on TikTok, featuring Cilla Black (RIP).

This definitely trended earlier in the year. I know this because we made content for it:

But looking into it, it also trended last month. And it’s trending again now. What’s going on? Are we just locked into an eternal cycle of Cilla Black memes forever?

Probably not. Trends come and go, and sometimes even come back again later. Algorithms may control every aspect of our lives, but trends are ultimately driven by human interests, fickle and fleeting as they may be.

So the next time someone asks you ‘what’s trending on social at the moment’, you can link them to this post or simply scream at them. Or both. Whatever works for you.

Thanks for reading.