Welcome to the epic conclusion of my… two part essay series about trends. Maybe not so epic… maybe I’m just overcompensating since early reviews seem to hate The Mandalorian & Grogu (I’m a Star Wars kid at heart). Maybe I’m just hopped up because I slept 8 hours last night for literally the first time in a month.

But hey, let’s get into trends! We’re gonna hit on:

—Jack Appleby

Social media marketers loveee to make trend content, often even more than original content. Think the dopamine hits of participating in what’s happening on social is a big factor there… but I’ll save the armchair psychoanalysis for another time.

I’ve long argued against brands making trend content, but you know what?

Some trends are absolutely worthwhile for brands!

The skill is knowing how to pick a trend.

So today, I wanna give you a framework for selecting which trends to participate in—how to frame your trend and draft off the cultural relevance in a way that generates engagement from people who might actually buy your product.

Let’s start with what you probably already know: when a trend is popping off on social media, that's where attention is. That's what people are scrolling through, engaging with, sending to their group chats. If your brand shows up in that conversation, you're riding a wave of existing engagement instead of trying to generate your own from scratch. Trends provide cultural context that makes the everyday scroller more likely to slap the like button on your brand’s content.

Last week I made the case that brands lean on trends too heavily, that original content is the more important skill, and that consumers are literally telling us they want more original stuff. I stand by all of that. But I also think the industry discourse around trends has gotten a little too binary—either trends are lazy and embarrassing, or they're a necessary survival tactic. The truth is somewhere in between.

Here are four filters to run any trend through before your team jumps on it.

Before your team drops everything to jump on the latest thing, run that trend through these four questions. If it doesn't clear all four, skip it and get back to your regularly scheduled content.

I covered this above. Showing up where attention already exists is the baseline argument for trends. But the conversation doesn't have to be massive. It could be a global trend that everyone on the platform is riffing on, or it could be something niche, like a meme circulating in your specific industry, a format that's popping off within your product category, a joke that only your audience would get. The scale of the trend matters less than whether the people you're trying to reach are already engaged with it.

If you need a designer, a photographer, a copywriter, and three rounds of legal approval to get your trend content made, you’re gonna miss the boat. 27% of consumers say trend content only works within 24-48 hours. The trends worth doing are the ones a social manager can knock out in minutes without derailing the rest of their day.

I wanna double down on that last point. I’ve watched entire ad agency teams drop everything to brainstorm against whatever trend’s going viral that day—THAT IS NOT THE WAY. You can’t disrupt busy workflows on the regular just for trends. Ability to execute quickly is vital, both in content production & your company’s day-to-day.

Here's where the vast majority of brand trend content goes wrong. If you swapped your logo for a competitor's and the post still made sense, that's not brand content, it's filler. Your version of a trend needs a payoff that's unmistakably yours. Your product, your audience's language, something that could only come from your account. Generic joke plus trending format equals forgettable. Specific punchline plus trending format equals strategy. I’ll show you a great example later in this article.

This is a different question than number three, and it's the one that matters most. Tying the punchline back to your brand is about you. This filter is about them, the people engaging with it.

Brands love pointing at like counts on trend posts. But likes from who? If the engagement is coming from people who would never buy your product, those are vanity metrics dressed up as results. What you want is engagement where someone is publicly saying "that's me"—where liking or sharing your post is an act of self-identification with your brand. That's not just reach, that’s your customers advocating for you. And that's worth infinitely more than impressing other social media managers.

Remember the trend from last week's intro? Eight brands all posting the same "date cancelled" format on Threads? Let me show you why that trend was actually worth doing.

For anyone who missed it: the "date cancelled" trend uses hidden text on Threads. You post "date cancelled:" followed by blurred text that reveals a punchline when someone drags their finger across it. Every brand that participated kinda nailed it.

Let’s look at how Taco Bell played the trend.

Here’s what their Thread looked like before and after scrollers clicked on the blurred text to reveal the punchline.

Alright, cool, we got a Nacho Fries reference (a guilty pleasure of mine).

Let’s revisit our Trend Checklist:

That’s four of a kind, that’s an easy win, and Taco Bell saw awesome engagement.

You get the picture, but for the sake of thoroughness, let’s look at Denny’s approach to the trend:

Denny’s loves to get all meta, so they actually fired off four attempts at the trend. What I love here: the engagement comparison between the four actually shows the value in not just brand specificity, but stronger humor.

The “doesn’t like bacon” and “eats pancakes with no syrup” punchlines didn’t generate much attention! They’re too simple, they’re too generic.

But the “thinks breakfast for dinner is childish and unbecoming” and" “lives in a house made of pancakes or something idk” lines are much stronger and generated twice as much engagement as the others! And the checklist proves why.

Denny’s is known for serving breakfast any time of the day, so that punchline hits harder for both brand tie-in (point 3) and making your customers feel seen (point 4). Then you have the house of pancakes line, which is a direct shot at IHOP, their biggest competitor—that screams point 4, where Denny’s followers proudly rep Denny’s over IHOP.

It just goes to show that hitting the checklist items is important, but hitting them well means your trend will fly further.

I’m known as a trend hater in the social media industry. I’ve pretty viciously ripped brands that over rely on trends, and how our peers seem to champion trend content over original content.

I’m not against trends at all! But what frustrates me is that it often feels like social media managers want to make trend content wayyy more than they want to make great original stuff, and I think we’re losing the plot. We’re actually getting farther from proving ROI of our work. Trend content’s really just measured on how many likes a post gets, while original content has meaningful brand ties & takes at least theoretical angles to why someone would enjoy using the products we represent.

I also fully reject that brands do trends from lack of budget. Basement YouTubers get millions of views with no budget. Budget is not an excuse to not make original content. Ideas are free. I believe a brand of any size can make great original content. It requires more work. It requires developing an original content skill set that is genuinely harder than jumping on what's trending. But it generates better business results and better social results than trend content ever will.

Trends should be a small part of your strategy. A fun, low-lift supplement to the original content engine that's actually building your brand. When a trend clears the four filters above, absolutely do it. Then get back to making your own stuff.

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