Content Trends

The patterns, themes, formats, styles, or types of content that gain significant popularity and attention across social media tend to be those that are shared and replicated by a wide and diverse range of users, including the influencers and brands that are integral to the social media experience. These trends usually encompass many (if not most) of the content forms that are the lifeblood of social media: videos, images, memes, image-and-text hybrids, challenges (think 'Ice Bucket Challenge'), hashtags, text posts, and even audio snippets. Content trends are first and foremost driven by visibility, and almost everything that happens on social media happens because of something else that has been highly visible and has 'gone viral.' Content trends tend to be organized around increasingly visible conversations, for which certain types of content acts as conversation-starters or -continuers.