The Argument for Trending Audios

Whether you’re a business owner or a marketer, the internal dialogue around trends tends to be quite similar.

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Business owners tend to be anti-trend because they feel it negatively impacts a company’s brand. They’ll have an aversion to creating trends for fear of the video being “off brand,” or otherwise negatively impacting their brand.

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As content creators, trends can be limiting. We like to be creative, and we like to create content that is more visually impressive. Simply put, trends are often a waste of the creative potential of our team.

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Yet, we constantly find ourselves recreating trending content. Why do we subject ourselves to this torture?

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Social media is like a game, and it’s constantly telling you exactly how to win. The "algorithm" is just a puzzle, and like a puzzle it can be solved. Our primary goal is to solve that puzzle so that business owners don’t have to.

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When we create content strategies, we are very aware of what is trending, and how we can use that information to make better videos. This is why we’ve found some of the golden rules of social media. It’s now common knowledge that you have to hook your audience in the first seven seconds of the video. That’s because our analytics tell us that. We know that video content gets more impressions than photos. The analytics told us that too. The analytics play a role in every decision we make.

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When we employ trending content, we do it because the analytics clearly like them. There are both technical and sociological reasons for this.

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To understand the technical advantage of using trends, one must first understand what the algorithm prioritizes. Instagram wants you to stay on the platform as long as possible. To do this, it shows you content that it believes you will watch to the end of a video. The app does not take many risks on this front. If an individual audio has already proven to hold people’s attention, it’s just going to promote that audio more. This creates a system that makes unique content disadvantageous, instead rewarding content that complies with platform norms. For our purposes, it also means that using a trending audio will have your video pushed out to more people.

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On a human level, trends work because people like to see things they are familiar with. Sure, we get out of our comfort zone at points, but our daily scroll sessions are often not the time for discovery. We like when we know exactly what our feeds will show us, and we know our feeds will be riddled with trending content. Across all levels of business, it makes sense to give people what they want. Would you take away a popular menu item because it was “trending?” Or, knowing that people already love the dish, would you push it more? We think we know the answer.

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As previously mentioned, one of the biggest pushbacks we get on trends, particularly ones with a song in the background, is that they “don’t align with brand guidelines.” This is true. Oftentimes trending videos are not ones we would post in any other circumstance. Whether it’s a song that you would never play in your restaurant or something that you would just never say, trending videos don’t always match your brand’s original content.

I would like to encourage you to do away with that mindset. People on social media know they are watching a trending video, and they know that your brand did not write the script for said video. They’re able to suspend their disbelief for long enough to engage with your content, even if it’s something you would otherwise never post. Your brand is not going to lose any credibility. At worst, no one will remember your video. At best, it goes viral, and you’ve now unlocked a new universe of customers.

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We understand the apprehension of jumping on trending content. Trust me, we feel it on our end too. But, there’s a reason we keep making them, and it’s because they work. We hope you’ll let us keep making them for you.

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