Well, we’re gonna talk about trends again. It’s everyone’s favorite social media topic to debate, it’s one I’ve expressed strong feelings about, anddd this time I’m gonna approach it a bit differently. This newsletter’s the first of a two-parter—you’ll have to come back next Wednesday for the big ending. This week, we’re talking about:

—Jack Appleby

Have you noticed every brand on social media just seems to copy each other?

One brand’s unhinged, so everyone else goes unhinged. Another brand launches ~episodic content~, so now everyone’s gotta be episodic. Don’t even get me started on “employee-generated content” (a terrible idea for most brands).

But complaining without a solution is bad practice, so let’s talk about the Build-To-Breakthrough Framework:

This is from the folks at Caliber—we’ve partnered together a few times now that they’re making these social media reports I find legitimately helpful and awesome. They’ve smartly branded an approach I’ve used for awhile now.

This comes from their new social media report, The Drop, with 23 slides of thinking including:

Get the report here, it’s essential fundamental social thinking!

You might’ve seen this screenshot floating around the social media manager water cooler. Eight different brand accounts all posting the same "date cancelled" trend on Threads within hours of each other. Staples, Aldi, Taco Bell, Zillow, Brita, Denny's, Metricool, Beyond Meat—all doing the exact same thing.

If you’ve been ‘round my newsletter for awhile, you know that I’m pretty anti-trend content, for reasons we’ll get into later in this piece.

BUT—this trend right here? There’s actually some stuff I love about it. So here’s what we’re gonna do: today’s newsletter is my argument against our industry’s all-too-heavy reliance on trends. Next week, I’ll make the case why every brand should have participated in a trend like “date cancelled.” There’s no one way to do social, we’re all making it up as we go, I’d rather help educate you on all arguments so you can social to your heart’s content.

So let’s talk about my beef with trends, and what I think we can all do to become much better social media marketers.

Listen, trend content can be great! I've advised on plenty of trend content for brands, and I ultimately do believe they have a place in your social strategy. But there are so many reasons why an over-reliance on trends can be a major misstep in brand social strategies.

The fight for & against trends is a constant debate among social pros. I’ve already told you my stance, so here’s a couple arguments from some notable voices.

I’d encourage you to read their posts & the comment sections to get a feel for their full arguments & how other social marketers are thinking about trends. Personally, I’m somewhere between those three.

This is my more honest point, and the one I feel most strongly about.

It feels like many social media marketers care a lot more about social media than marketing.

It is literally your job to make your brand interesting. That's the gig. And I fundamentally refuse to accept the idea that you need cultural context, be it trends, memes, whatever's happening on the internet that day, to do it.

Your product is interesting. It solves a problem. It gives someone an emotional experience. It makes their life better in some specific way. There is a reason people buy it, and that reason is more than enough raw material to make compelling content. If you can't figure out how to make your brand interesting without borrowing from the internet… well, that’s kind of the whole point of our jobs.

The most important skill a creative in social media can develop is the ability to make content that stands on its own. No trending audio, no meme format, no cultural moment to ride. Just your brand, your product, and an idea good enough to stop someone's thumb.

That's hard! I know it's hard. It's wayyyy harder than jumping on a trend. But it's also the thing that separates good social media marketers from great ones. And it's the thing that actually builds a brand over time instead of renting someone else's cultural moment for a day.

We have the best jobs in the world. We're paid to be creative! We get to make content for a living! Yeah, it's for brands, but that's the job! And it's a good one. I'll stress that I'm not telling you to be boring—if you think it's boring making content for your brand without relying on trends and memes… that's kind of a you thing.

If I'm gonna tell you to stop relying on trends, I should probably give you some tools. Here are five frameworks for generating original content ideas, every one of which starts with your brand, not what's trending.

1. The Benefit Ladder: Functional → Emotional → Identity. Start with what your product does (functional). Go one level deeper to how it makes someone feel (emotional). Then one more to who it makes them feel like (identity). A running shoe hits pavement (functional), makes you feel fast (emotional), signals you're the kind of person who gets up at 6am (identity). Each rung should inspire completely different content ideas that can really make your customers feel seen.

2. The Use Case Blitz. Write down 25 ways people use your product. Then write 4 content ideas for each of those use cases. Yeah, this is Social Media Marketing 101, but it's an often skipped style of brainstorming. If your content calendar's full of your first ideas, you're not generating enough ideas.

3. Content Pillars. Again, this is theeee most basic social media strategy, but since I’ve started consulting again, I’ve been surprised how few brands are using them right now! Define 3-5 core themes tied to your brand, and pitch ideas that relate back to those core themes. When you're staring at an empty calendar, you're no longer asking "what's trending?" You're asking "which pillar haven't I hit this week?"

4. Caliber Collective's Build-to-Breakthrough Framework. Yeah, they’re sponsors of mine, but they’re right. Audience Insight + Original Idea + Platform Insight. Start with a conversation that's been bubbling untapped in your audience. Apply bisociative thinking—is your idea genuinely yours, or could any brand have made it? Then pressure-test whether your format is right for the platform you're posting to. It's three filters that force originality at every step.

5. The Customer Support Goldmine. Go read your brand's last 50 support tickets, DMs, reviews, or Reddit threads. Every complaint is a content idea. Every question is a content idea. Every weird use case someone discovered on their own is a content idea. This is the single most underused source of original content in social media, and it's sitting in your inbox right now.

I’d actually love to hear how your team approaches your brainstorms, maybe even feature some of them on my LinkedIn! Reply right to this email or drop me a DM on LinkedIn to share how you think about thinking.