Are You Ready For The Holiday Season?
Trendjacking is when a company exploits a current topic to increase profits or to spread brand awareness. The suffix of the word is ‘jacking’, like car-jacking or hijacking, and hence, the term appropriately means to take advantage of a current trend, so as to propel one’s digital voice. If done correctly, trendjacking can be an effective way to amplify your brand.
Trendjacking is usually easily digested content – such as a tweet, post, image or video. Tomorrow, today’s hottest trend will be old news. Lava lamps and bell bottoms won’t likely garnish much interest. As a result, effective trendjacking is distributed quickly across all of your social media channels, while the trend is hot.
Newsjacking
Newsjacking is the same concept as trendjacking but, you guessed it, instead of taking advantage of a social trend, newsjacking is using a current news story to boost your visibility. Such a marketing tactic can be very tricky. Most stories on the news have two sides. By mentioning a current events story, you could be offending a large pool of potential customers.
As Long as They are Current, Trendjacking is Generally Beneficial
Unlike news stories, everyone is interested in social trends. At least, anyone who is on Twitter or Facebook, searching for what is currently hot, is likely to take interest in your post if it mentions the big social trend. Another immense benefit of trendjacking is that everyone knows about them. Therefore, trendjacking places something very familiar in your posts or tweets. Try to imagine two tweets. One is an image of a brand new toaster. The other has the toaster as well, but with Santa Claus removing a tray of muffins from it. As long as the time of year is around Christmas, the Santa tweet will certainly sell more of those toasters.
Scheduling Trendjacking
Have you ever wanted the power to predict tomorrow’s trends? The coolest thing about trendjacking, is that with one quick glance at your calendar, you could schedule a year’s worth of tweets, posts, images and videos. Almost every day of the year is of some national importance. Just a few of them are, National Personal Trainer Day, Groundhog Day, National Tater Tot Day, National Donut Day, and even the best day of the year, National Drink Wine Day. Check out this website for a list of every special day of recognition throughout the year. Although some of these days are relatively unknown, to some people in that particular industry, seeing a post or a tweet promoting their trade would undoubtedly excite them. Hence, most would likely share it to others, or maybe even mention your organization on one of their tweets or posts.
Holidays
Holidays are the most reliable trendjacking vehicles. Big holidays, such as Valentine’s Day, Christmas, Thanksgiving, Halloween and Easter all cast a delicious holiday mood across the country. Any tweets that trendjack this festive holiday spirit, automatically get a foot in the door.
Trendjacking could be your best marketing tool, but it could also be your worst. When it comes to holidays, you may not want to overdo it. A tweet featuring your advertisement every day, except with a different holiday mentioned, could become very annoying. Witty and humorous tweets and images, however, will always be appreciated.
