Did you know?

• When it comes to slang words, the term ‘bae’ (a loving term that means ‘before all else’, normally used to describe friends) peaked in the summer of 2014, while ‘Stan’ (coined by rapper Eminem to describe a superfan) started to peak in July 2019 but is already in decline.

• Certain emotions we share on social have remained constant over the decade – joy is the most popular, while fear and surprise have remained pretty constant over the years, anger has declined to be replaced by sadness and disgust.

• Meanwhile, Justin Bieber has managed to maintain a solid presence over the past 10 years, challenged in 2015 by our very own One Direction who’ve since faded to be usurped in popularity by the k-pop group BTS which is on track to go ‘stratospheric’!

• As for the most popular games, Fortnite has taken 57% of the share of voice on social media, eclipsing the combined efforts of Pokemon Go, Candy Crush and Angry Birds … and it’s a relatively new game so who knows what the stats will look like in another decade.

• No surprises to learn that Kim Kardashian, Kylie Jenner and Kendall Jenner have amassed an 81% share of online conversation (which some might say is rather depressing).

• Finally, while vegetarianism has maintained a steady amount of online conversation since 2010, veganism has seen a massive rise in popularity – in fact, veganism has swallowed a massive 75% share of voice and shows no sign of letting up.

Apart from providing you with some fun facts to drop into your next conversation, there is a serious point to this.

While some trends remain fairly constant over longer periods of time, most come, gain traction and then go. 

Trends provide social media managers with great opportunities to get noticed but it’s important to jump on the bandwagon early when the trend is emerging.  Leave it too late and you just look like a ‘me too’ who doesn’t have their finger on the pulse of popular culture.

At RMS, we have lots of tools at our disposal to help identify trends as they appear on the horizon, which we can then exploit on behalf of clients.  We can even find out what people are saying about your brand online and create content and campaigns that we know will tap appeal to your target audience.  It’s all ever so clever!