Trends on social media change faster than attention spans can settle. Staying ahead and keeping up with these trends becomes a stressful matter for brands.Â
One day, you’re figuring out a new trend and publishing your content based on that, and, within 48 hours, the once-trending event has now become old news or history.
Spotting content trends in real time has become important if businesses wish to stay in the competition. Trending content is the force that drives customers to a brand’s page, increases engagement, and boosts conversions.Â
But, how can you stay on top of trends when they seem to evolve faster than you can create content? That is when Visual Listening and Instagram Insights become powerful for businesses.Â
Let’s first understand why content plays such an important role for brands:
The Unseen Force: Why Content Drives Digital Win
Content is an integral part of marketing for brands. Businesses need relevant, trending content to promote their products and services. Whether it’s Instagram, YouTube or a brand’s website, content is a core driver of success. Let’s take a look at a few reasons why content matters:
- Drives Brand Awareness
To increase brand visibility, well-crafted content is important. When your content resonates with your target audience, it gets shared and, thus, increases brand awareness. Relevant and trending hashtags help your content appear in front of the right audience, making it viral. - Establishes Trust and Credibility
Good quality content relevant to your industry positions your brand as an expert. If your content is educational and creates knowledge for customers, it makes your brand look credible in the eyes of your target audience. When your content helps customers solve problems and answer questions, it creates a trusted voice for your brand. This eventually gets converted into customer loyalty and sales. - Engages Audience and Encourages action
As much as the content has to be informative and entertaining, it must be compelling enough for customers to take action. Whether it’s a website visit, signing up for a newsletter, making a purchase, or simply sharing content, it must drive action. A rich content-driven post prompts a purchase action from the customers. - Drives SEO and Organic Reach
SEO ensures that your content reaches the right target audience. To drive SEO, good quality content is everything. Search engines indexes and ranks pages that have relevant, trending and keyword driven content. A well-optimized content automatically drives SEO and builds customer base organically. - Encourages Community Building
Community Building is the strongest part about creating content. It brings like-minded individuals together to foster growth and success. When you create content that resonates highly with your target audience, they share it, comment on it, and become a part of the whole conversation. This fosters a sense of community.
Customers have a habit of scrolling through Instagram or other social media pages. They don’t spend more than 10 seconds on a content, unless it’s trending or relevant to them. To gain the attention span of customers for longer than just seconds, traditional listening is no more an option. Brands need to engage in Visual Listening.
Let’s understand what visual listening is:
What is Visual Listening?
Visual listening is a process of observing and interpreting the visual elements that customers are interacting with across online platforms. Whether it’s photos, videos, graphics or designs, if it is visually appealing to the audience, it becomes an important part of the content.Â
Visual Listening finds out those visual clues that resonate best with the customers and how those clues are consumed by them.Â
How does visual listening work?
Visual Listening tracks and analyzes the visual content that is gaining maximum attention within your target customers or industry. These visual elements include:
Color Palettes
Specific colors that are dominating the content that’s being shared or saved? Types of color palettes used, bright or dark colors?
Content Format
Which content format is gaining more attention? Whether it is videos or static posts, carousel posts or multiple frames.
Visual Themes
That is gaining more attention, whether it is nature-themed, vintage, educational.
Hashtags & Trends
Tracking trending hashtags and popular content trends that are being used the most by customers.
Visual trends speak louder than words. A keen eye/ear for details is necessary to understand the content trends that are trending in the online space. Visual Listening becomes the key for brands to stay consistent and relevant.
Instagram is a far more useful tool than just posting photos, reels or stories. Paired with Visual Listening, Instagram Insights becomes a powerful tool to track engagement, identify emerging trends, and optimize content strategy accordingly. With Instagram Insights, turn data into powerful strategies to stay ahead of the trend.
What are Instagram insights?
Instagram insights is a built-in analytics tool that provides detailed information on how well your content is performing. It allows business profiles and creators to track and measure key metrics such as reach, impressions, engagement, demographic profile of the followers, and a lot more.
With the help of this Instagram analytics tool, brands can:
- See the best performing posts, most engaged with reels and stories in the form of likes, comments, shares, saves, and interactions
- Track audience activity, when they become active and what type of content resonates with themÂ
- Tailor content based on the demographics of your followers
Instagram competitors analysis is another important factor for brands looking to stay relevant and outsmart competitors in the digital space. While Instagram insights provide brands with valuable data on their own content, competitor analysis provides brands with impactful data on rivals’ content. By understanding what the competitors are doing right or wrong, brands can optimize their content and strategies based on those insights.Â
With Instagram analytics tools, brands can:
- Identify key competitors
- Track hashtag usage
- Analyze top performing content
- Frequency and timing of the content
- Type of content trends being followed
Combining Visual Listening and IG Insights to Spot Content Trends
Combining visual listening and IG Insights is how forward-thinking brands stay relevant on trending topics. The synergy between the two helps brands refine their strategy and increase engagement. Here’s how brands can combine the two:
1. Spot visual trends through Visual Listening and validate with Insights
When brands engage in Visual Listening, they identify aesthetics, visual patterns, and styles that are gaining popularity across Instagram. Brands come across certain color palettes, photo carousels or video formats that are repeatedly emerging in posts of their competitors or relevant industry brands. This gives brands the popular content trend, and Instagram insights helps them understand how well that trend is performing with the audience.
2. Track Trends Over Time with Insights
Identifying a trend is not enough. Brands need to constantly track these trends over time with the help of Instagram analytics tools to figure out the exact days of the week, when the content is receiving maximum attention. Instagram insights help brands track success of content trends over time. Figure out:
- How well your audience is reacting to the popular trends followed by your brand?
- Which specific time of the day is your audience engaging with your content the most?
- Which visual element is receiving higher engagement?
3. Content Experimentation & Iteration
Combining visual listening with Instagram insights provides a key benefit to brands. They can continuously experiment their content with different visual styles and elements, then use Instagram insights to determine which elements work the best for them.
For example, Instagram reels are gaining maximum popularity for short-format video content. Brands can test various video content styles – educational, tutorial or how-to master this – and with the help of Instagram analytics tool figure out the content style working best for their audience.
4. Cross-Platform Trend Spotting
Visual Listening with Instagram insights is popular but trends are not limited to only Instagram. Popular content trends often cross platforms like Pinterest, TikTok or YouTube sometimes. Brands can perform visual listening on multiple platforms, find trends using Instagram analytics tools that are gaining popularity among the audience and leverage those insights for their own content.Â
For example, Brands may find a content trend on YouTube shorts that is gaining maximum engagement from the audience. They can try posting the same format content style and use Instagram Insights to track whether the post is receiving comments, shares, and saves from the audience. If it does, brands can go ahead and follow the content trend.
5. Refine your Brand’s Visual Identity
When brands combine visual listening and Instagram insights, they can use the data to refine the brand’s overall visual identity. Trends are momentary, they last for a week or sometimes, just a day. The most important thing for brands is to figure out which content style has been consistently performing best for them. This way, brands can include that content style in the brand’s overall aesthetic. They can become the experts when it comes to delivering a consistent content trend as the content style gets incorporated with the brand’s visual identity. It’s important to understand what content trend your customers prefer the most and how they resonate themselves with your brand. Once brands crack this code, using both these tools, they can not only stay ahead of trends and test them with the audience but can also strategize content trends in real-time.
Locobuzz, with its content benchmarking feature, empowers brands to track the effectiveness of their content strategy by analyzing what truly resonates with audiences – across platforms, industries, and competitors. With AI-powered listening and advanced analytics, marketers can track how their posts perform in terms of engagement, sentiment, reach, and share of voice. The platform doesn’t stop at internal metrics, it maps your performance against top competitors, highlighting gaps, opportunities, and best-performing content formats. This allows brands to fine-tune messaging, choose the right channels, and adopt content strategies that drive real impact. It answers questions like: What’s working for others that you haven’t tried yet? What hashtags, formats, or themes are trending in your category? These data-backed benchmarks help teams move away from guesswork and build content that is timely, engaging, and competitive
Conclusion
Content is the most important force that customers resonate with when it comes to a brand. The personality of your brand is displayed through the content patterns and trends you use to engage with your audience. The combination of visual listening and Instagram marketing tools is powerful for brands and they need to make the best use of it. Visual Listening helps brands spot the most emerging patterns and popular content trends way before these trends become viral on social media. Then, Instagram Insights provides data that validates the popularity of these trends. Insights ensure that your brand is not just doing a guesswork about trends but making decisions based on real-time data. Together, they give your brand the foresight and clarity to create content that doesn’t just follow the trend, but sets one. Use both, and you won’t just stay relevant, you’ll lead!
