How to Balance Evergreen and Trending Social Content Without Hurting Your Business Goals

You want to jump on trends, go viral, and attract a bigger audience.

But you also need evergreen content to build trust with your audience so that they want to buy your products.

How do you balance going viral and promoting your core business goals?

That’s exactly what we’ll cover in this guide.

Read on to find out how to balance the two approaches without hurting your goals.

Evergreen vs trending content: key differences

Here are some key differences between evergreen and trending content:

Evergreen content	Trending content
Relevant for years	Relevant for days or weeks
Created to build trust	Created to gain attention
Drives long-term traffic	Drives short-term traffic
Topics are predictable	Topics are unpredictable
Prioritizes excellent execution over speed	Prioritizes speed over excellent execution

Keep these differences in mind when creating content or setting goals for each group.

How to balance evergreen and trending social content

1. Set relevant goals for each content approach

Since evergreen and trending content pursue different purposes, their goals should be different.

For example, you can judge evergreen content by comments, DMs, or the number of link clicks.

Meanwhile, trending content may be judged by the number of likes, shares, and saves.

So, set relevant goals for each group and track them separately to understand the effectiveness of each group. 

2. Determine the evergreen and trending content ratio for your business

Evergreen and trending content ratio provides a structure for the number of posts to create for each group.

While some advise a blanket ratio for everyone, the right ratio depends on your industry.

Here are my hypotheses for some industries: 

• Tech (50% evergreen and  50% trending)
• Finance (90% evergreen and 10% trending)
• Health (80% evergreen and 20% trending)
• Marketing (60% evergreen and 40% trending)
• Entertainment (20% evergreen and 80% trending)
• Sports (20% evergreen and 80% trending)

Of course, these percentages are not set in stone.

Use your industry expertise to come up with a ratio and adjust it based on your results.

3. Create a style guide to shorten approval time

A style guide puts every creator on the same page and empowers them to create on-brand content even without oversight.

A style guide is a set of standards for a brand’s writing and design to ensure consistent communication. It contains many elements, including:

• Brand voice
• Visual elements (logos, colors, fonts, etc.)
• Grammar and punctuation
• Types of content against your brand values
• What makes a trend relevant to your business
• How to insert your brand and products into trends

With a detailed style guide, creators can quickly create and publish trending content without waiting a week for approval from legal.

By having a detailed style guide, Duolingo published content quickly and grew its social media following to over 31 million.

The company’s former senior global social media manager, Zaria Parvez, says:

“The people creating the content are the approvers. The buck stops with the social team. This culture is so ingrained now at Duolingo, that if I even ask our PR team or Senior Leadership if they want to approve a certain post, they always look at me like I’m crazy. They trust us to do our job.”

That said, creating a style guide can still be hard if you’ve never done it. In this case, check out examples like MailChimp and Duolingo for inspiration.

4. Plan a flexible content calendar

A flexible content calendar leaves weekly or monthly posting slots for trending content. 

With this, you can maintain a similar posting frequency regardless of the number of trends during a period. Beyond that, a flexible calendar lets you adjust your posting schedule as new trends crop up. 

When planning your calendar, consider these 3 broad categories:

• Evergreen posts: Plan your weekly or monthly evergreen posts based on your preferred ratio. Even if you don’t specify a publish date, have your evergreen content ready.
• Seasonal trends: Events like Christmas, Thanksgiving, Valentine’s Day, and Black Friday occur at specific times of the year. So, track these events and plan for them. 
• Unpredictable trends: Leave posting slots for these trends whenever they show up. Then, watch out for the most relevant trends for your business. 

To plan a flexible content calendar, you need a social media management tool. 

Apart from providing a content overview in the calendar, some tools also show popular holidays for post inspiration.

A flexible content calendar gives you structure without hurting your ability to jump on trends.

5. Track results and adjust strategy accordingly

Tracking your content metrics helps you understand what’s working and what needs to change.

Some common metrics to track include:

• The number of evergreen vs trending posts published
• Engagement
• Leads generated
• Clicks

The most important metrics for you will depend on your goals.

Use any (or both) of these methods to find your metrics:

• Social media platform analytics: Each social network offers profile metrics to track your post performance. However, the numbers are scattered across multiple platforms, and some metrics may be missing.
• Social media tools: Social analytics and social management tools provide metrics for multiple networks in one place. For example, a tool like Vista Social lets you label your posts and track metrics separately for evergreen and trending posts.

Once you collect metrics, draw insights from them to adjust your content strategy.

Conclusion

A balance of evergreen and trending content helps you get the best of both worlds.

With trending content, you can attract a lot of attention and use evergreen content to build trust with your audience.

Consider both approaches whenever planning your weekly or monthly social media content.

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