Using trending topics to encourage social media users to visit your website

Effective internet marketing is all about being clever with timing, promotions and content. One way to attract people to your website is to use trending topics. You may think the trending topics popular on social media have little to do with your business but that is not the case.

Every day, online, you will see examples of brands and companies using trending topics to attract people to their sites. Some attempts are better than others, but the one thing they all have in common is increased exposure because they are using trending topics.

For this article, we are presuming you have a corporate Twitter account, or Facebook account. If you follow our blog you will have seen article about social media posted in recent weeks. For tips on social media scroll down and locate the relevant articles to answer your specific questions and get advice on marketing on social media. For those of you who are already using social media, read on.

Using trending topics is powerful because you are, in effect, piggy-backing on the crest of a popularity wave.

Check what is currently trending on Twitter at the moment. There are various website you can visit to see an up to date list of trending topics and the top hashtags, www.hashtags.org is very good.

Many of the topics will not be relevant to your or your brand. However, be creative and think outside of the box. Trending topics can be an opportunity to be really creative. For example topics on the weather are always high on the list. A café could take advantage of trending topics about a very cold day by offering warm coffees and fresh muffins. Or during the summer months, a cooling iced tea on a super-hot day. These are very simple, obvious examples but they are just to illustrate the point for you.

Think about what your brand is offering and try to find ways that you can use the discussion of trending topics to hook in and include your brand. If you want more examples of how to do this effectively, have a look at the Twitter accounts of Oreo, Twitter, Huffington Post and The Guardian, they are all masters at posting tweets using the trending hashtags.

Keeping an eye on trending topics is also a great way to pick up on what is popular and what is not! Companies have expanded over night as a result of well-timed Tweets. And in the same vein, individuals and companies have suffered huge losses because they posted untimely Tweets without checking the trending topics.