How APAC Social Media Leaders Stay Ahead of Emerging Industry Trends

Social media stands for nothing if not speed.

It’s where we turn to share real-time personal and professional updates, and to consume breaking news. It’s where we @-mention brands to quickly find out where our shipment is. Increasingly, it’s where trends form, incubate and explode—sometimes in a matter of days.

Keeping up with trends is no longer limited to market analysts and forecasters. Our 2023 State of Social Media report revealed that 46% of business leaders say predicting future trends is a top priority in today’s economic climate.

The use of social data to understand market trends will only accelerate in the coming years, but staying on top of trending topics and fast-changing algorithms won’t become any easier for social media managers—in fact, the opposite is more likely to be true.

For starters, trending content emerges and fades faster than ever before. Changes in social media channel guidelines also add to the pressure of staying on top of social trends. Our Q2 2023 Pulse Survey revealed that nearly one in two marketers wrestle with changing algorithms.

With so many day-to-day responsibilities to juggle—from maintaining a content calendar to project management and ongoing reporting—it’s easy for social media leaders to drop the ball on identifying and responding to the latest trends. We spoke to four social media leaders across Asia Pacific (APAC) to find out how social teams can identify and respond to trends more effectively:

• Brittany Ruppert, Social Marketing Manager at LinkedIn Australia
• Benjamin Munro Smith, Social Media Manager at Macquarie University
• Jack Breen, Social Media Manager at UNSW Sydney
• Diogo Martins, Bloomr.SG Lead at Mediacorp

Staying on—let alone ahead—of trends is easier said than done. There are many different pain points that prevent marketers from integrating a proactive trend strategy into their plans:

• Time and resource constraints: Staying informed while fulfilling your day-to-day responsibilities as a social media marketer is a constant struggle. Consider the growing preference for hyper-local content that caters to APAC’s cultural and linguistic diversity.
• The rapid pace of change: The swift evolution of social media demands constant vigilance and adaptability to the latest algorithms and features.
• Platform diversity: Even the most experienced professionals can find it daunting to manage an extensive range of social media channels, each with unique features and audiences.
• Discerning fads vs. lasting trends: Many trends will pop up on your radar. It can be challenging to tell which ones are worth your time and attention.
• Competition: On social, brands don’t simply vie for attention against their direct competitors. In crowded feeds, your content needs to stand out amid a plethora of brands, influencers and individual users.
• Maintaining brand consistency: Striking a balance between adapting to new trends and preserving your brand’s identity can be a delicate task.

Do these challenges sound familiar to you?

If yes, here’s the good news: You’re not alone in this journey. The following five practical strategies—all tried and tested by our social media leaders—can help you harness emerging social media trends more effectively.

With trends moving faster than ever before, social media leaders must stay on top of what’s going on online. “It’s important to stay across trends-–this is something we must constantly monitor,” says Brittany Ruppert, Social Marketing Manager at LinkedIn Australia.

Instead of manually scrolling through thousands of posts, teams can use an all-in-one social media platform to quickly understand online conversations, identify emerging trends and determine their relevance.

Social monitoring can help you grasp how your brand, products or social media campaigns are perceived online. It’s the process of collecting social conversations and messages in one place, which can then be parsed and turned into action items—for instance, responding to complaints and questions on a certain channel.

Meanwhile, social listening involves analyzing conversations and trends related to your brand. These include conversations relevant to your company, competitors and industry at large. This data can then be used to understand emerging trends and whether or not it’s one your brand should participate in.

Social listening offers plenty of returns—from yielding customer insights more immediately and cost-effectively to developing marketing messages that promise higher conversions, sales and increases in customer lifetime value.

However, few businesses take full advantage of the social data available to them, guessing trends rather than truly listening.

More than two-thirds (69%) of business leaders say social media data and insights are currently underutilized at their company, according to The State of Social Media 2023 report. Nearly half (42%) cite limited access to social media tools and a lack of integration with other technology solutions as something that prevents their company from more effectively using social media data and insights to inform business decisions.

While taking a shot in the dark sounds harmless, a poorly executed trend risks diluting your brand and alienating your audience.

Generating data and reports about social media trends isn’t enough. You need to be able to respond and adapt your strategies as new trends and preferences gain traction.

“Our team takes an agile approach to our content creation,” explains Benjamin Munro Smith, Head of Social Media at Macquarie University “We commit annually to our high-level deliverables and KPIs signed off by our executive group. Still, we review our strategy monthly to consider any channel updates, user behavior changes and new trends impacting the Australian market.”

When you regularly listen and track social data, it’s easier to detect big picture shifts in what your audience cares about. For example, Ruppert and her team recognized the shift in how “professionalism” was understood in Australia.

“The lines between personal and professional have blurred as hybrid working is now the norm. Australian workers bring more of their personal selves to work,” says Ruppert. To have a follow-worthy presence, “our social strategy now focuses on driving meaningful connections and real value around topics that Australian professionals care about.”

Uncovering insights like these starts with having tools that can aggregate and make sense of information quickly—39% of business leaders in our 2023 State of Social Media Report cite a lack of time for analysis as one of the reasons the data is underutilized.

These data analytics tools can close the loop by helping you predict what your audience wants so you can adjust your content accordingly. “It’s beneficial to pre-plan content suited for specific platforms rather than attempt to retrofit what you have,” Munro Smith explains. “When filming content or interviewing people, have an idea of where this content will go, and take the time to get everything you need.”

Another way to bolster your content strategy is by involving authentic content creators and training them in your brand’s ethos. Tapping the right content creators for your brand helps diversify your brand’s voice, perspective and audience. This approach can also keep your content strategy flexible, depending on the goals of your campaign.

“We immediately involved content creators that fit our core demographic for [TikTok] and trained them in our brand points,” Munro Smith says. “We work with them regularly to create content that is genuine and authentic, in a style that is natural to them but includes subtle brand messages. Using this strategy, we have achieved over one million likes in less than a year.”

Jack Breen of UNSW Sydney echoes this sentiment: “To assist with the new high-frequency vertical video requirements, we have enlisted the support of new (paid) student creators, who are incredibly in tune with the student experience and online trends at a deep level,” he explains. “We get to benefit from their insights, and in turn, they get to learn from the broad skills and expertise of our social media coordinators to help kickstart their careers.”

Consumers use an average of 6.7 social media channels per month. The most dominant channels in APAC include Facebook, WeChat and TikTok. Other APAC-based contenders—Qzone, QQ and Sina Weibo included—are also each carving out their niche in the social media landscape.

With so many social media platforms available—each with unique features, audiences and best practices—it can be challenging to maintain expertise across all and incorporate them effectively into one strategy. Ruppert of LinkedIn Australia reminds us that each social media platform attracts unique audiences and it’s important to treat them differently.

“Not every piece of content is suited for every platform,” Ruppert explains. “Instead of merely adapting the same topic across different platforms, intelligent social marketing begins with strategically examining the messages and topics that resonate best with each platform and its audience, then crafting tailored creative accordingly.”

A Q4 2023 Sprout Pulse Survey reveals that 42% of people expect to use more social networks in 2024. Rather than trying to invest in every platform alongside your competition, now is the time for brands to meet their audience in more intentional ways.

“Consider how your audience uses each channel, what types of content they want to see, and what mindset they have when scrolling,” Ruppert suggests. “Think about how best to make your content stand out within their feed, based on the design of each platform and how people consume it.”

Munro Smith of Macquarie University echoes this sentiment. “We communicate with a range of core audiences, both domestic and international,” he says. “Achieving full audience engagement with one piece of content isn’t feasible, so we craft a strategy for each core market, letting this inform each channel’s strategy, leveraging the strengths of each medium.

As social media evolves, structuring team members around specific networks will eventually introduce challenges. Teams need to remain agile and break down silos as new developments occur (for instance, platforms like Threads gaining steam).

Breen of UNSW Sydney says, “We’ve managed change by dividing our team’s focus into two streams: one for our news-based content, like link posts and still images, and another for vertical video content focused on-campus experiences, such as Reels, TikTok and Stories.

“Each individual within the team is empowered to focus on one stream or the other, ensuring concentrated energy and expertise. They may also engage intermittently with the alternate stream to maintain diverse skills and continuous learning.

It can often feel like a new social trend peaks every minute. But not every trend will have a lasting significance or relevance on your business—marketers must be able to uncover what’s trending and decide what’s worth investing time and resources into.

But first, it’s crucial to build your understanding of trends. TikTok has developed a framework for understanding three distinct types of trends:

• Forces: Long-lasting trends that reflect long-term cultural shifts impacting everyone on the internet.
• Signals: Trends that signify greater cultural shifts in particular demographics and communities that last a few years.
• Moments: Trends that grab attention and resonate with existing customers for a few days, weeks or months.

Ruppert of LinkedIn Australia suggests brands develop a trend profile that best serves their business goals. This means saying “no” to a lot of trends that will not serve your brand in the long term, no matter how viral those trends might be.

“I strongly advise against jumping on every trend for the sake of it. This comes across as insincere,” Rupper suggests. “Savvy, social-native audiences do not hesitate to call out a brand that seems like it’s trying too hard to be relevant.”

You can designate team members as dedicated trend spotters to develop a robust trend profile. Even seasoned marketers need to do trendspotting from time to time to immerse themselves in changing consumer sentiments in a way that enables them to create truly relevant content.

Use social listening to surface the trends relevant to your audience, and look at social data to understand which trends may have a business impact. “Follow enough topics on social media to understand if a repurposed piece of content will make it to the FYPs,” explains Diogo Martins, Bloomr.SG Lead at Mediacorp. “Consider not only the topic but also the way a specific social platform works.”

Martins points out that they have the benefit of “multiple content producers at Mediacorp” working with Bloomr.SG to follow trends. “When we observe a trend emerging, we can usually discern if it will gain traction in the Singapore market, indicating that it would be prudent for us to embrace it from a client-serving perspective,” he says.

Social listening proved to be very effective for Macquarie University’s Munro Smith in 2022 when they wanted to promote their university’s course outcomes. At the time, the Little Miss trend (a meme template using characters from an illustrated children’s book series called Mr. Men) was making the rounds on social media.

Munro Smith and the team decided to ride that trend and create branded assets related to their course outcomes.

“The audience loved it,” Munro Smith recalls. “The series became some of our most saved pieces of content for 2022. We had a flurry of DMs from alumni and the in-feed comments were overly positive.”

Munro Smith suggests that teams collectively decide what trends to pursue and create a strategy from there. “Our weekly standup begins with the team all sharing what content they were seeing on their socials. As a group we then discuss how this could be used in our context (aligned to our content pillars) and then we vote for those we think are worth exploring,” he says.

Afterward, you need to plan a follow-up. “Be ready to keep going. A trend without follow-up is a waste of resources. Never just trend and disappear,” says Munro Smith.

While it’s a good tactic to embrace new trends and adapt to various platforms, don’t lose sight of your brand’s core identity. Strike the right balance to keep your brand’s voice consistent yet adaptable to relevant cultural conversations and industry trends.

Ruppert of LinkedIn Australia believes you need to keep the language and tone flexible. “Our brand voice represents the kind of person you’d want to work with daily—someone reliable for guidance and a source of advice and encouragement,” he explains. “Using our brand voice as a foundation, we maintain flexibility in our language and tone to suit different mediums.”

For example, LinkedIn Australia’s approach to TikTok is more centered on culture and trends. However, the firm caters to audiences seeking more in-depth, community-centric and career-enriching content on LinkedIn or Facebook.

Macquarie University’s Munro Smith says that it’s also important to be self-aware. “Ask yourself, should your brand be part of this conversation and discuss internally to see if there are any possible brand risks involved.”

To harmonize content with clients’ brand image and target audience, Mediacorp’s Martins engages in open and honest conversations with them. “We collaborate with our clients and internal brands to ascertain their desired positioning on the spectrum of content—whether it’s ‘authentic, free and easy’ or ‘rawthentic.’ Some clients prefer not to present as ‘raw,’ prompting us to create more polished, authentic content with them,” he says.

Trends might come and go, and virality is not an exact science, but knowing when and how to jump on one can help your brand stand out and potentially grow and engage your following. After all, trends are an opportunity to be creative and position your brand as relatable, keeping up with the times in a clever fashion.

Navigating a chaotic, quickly evolving social media landscape, however, requires a clear understanding of your audience, keeping an eye on competitors and staying up to date on industry trends. For leaders in APAC, harnessing the power of social data can play a crucial role in your strategic decision-making.

Compelling social media strategies use two common tools: Social data and insights that allow leaders to make decisions and pivot their strategies more quickly and an integrated tool to execute new content, strategies or campaigns swiftly and easily.

Social data is the key to identifying important trends that fit your brand and shape your business strategy. Responding to the right social media trends may be tricky, but you can apply these insider tips to cut through the noise.

Ready to take on the challenges of social media trend-spotting? Sprout Social is here to get you started. Request a personalized demo today.