In social media, trending are topics attracting the attention of most of the people in that moment. Unfortunately, trending topics are self-feeding. If something ends up top of the trending list, it becomes an accident alongside the highway. Everyone wants to slow down and take a look.
Walking by a student glued to their computer, I asked, “What are you looking at?”
Without lifting her eyes away, she replied, “What everyone else is looking at.”
That’s a good definition of trending.
You might think that today’s blog exercise is to find a trending topic and blog about it, but the exercise today is to look at your own trends.
What is on your site that everyone is looking at?
In a lovely response to my blog exercise on naming your favorite things, the author of Tony’s Texts wrote about his favorite things, saying “it made a nice change from the darker posts I’ve been writing.”
Tony, who calls himself Honest Puck, noticed that his site was trending towards the darker side of the force. Clearly he was attracted to that blog exercise as a safety rope, grabbing onto hope towards the lighter ways of the world, more fun, silliness, laughter, and joy.
As I work on the delayed first half of the ebook of these Blog Exercises, I can spot my own moods in the posts, even though I worked hard to keep “me” out of the equation. You never really can, but I tried. Still, I could see the ebbs and flows of life events shadowed in my choices, my own emotional trends.
In this blog exercise, look for your own trends.
Your trends may be found in your analytics and stats. What posts are people looking at the most? Are they recent posts or old posts? Where does the interest in your site lay?
Go through the list of posts over a specific time period, a week, month, several months, or several years. Look at the titles. Check out the content. Look at the image choices. Have you been staying on track or has your site been trending towards the dark or light, or possibly down a path of tangents?
What can you learn by this type of self-check in on your progress? Do you really like the new trend or should you take action to correct your course?
It’s up to you, but a check-in always helps to keep you on the right track.
Remember to include a hat tip link back to this post to create a trackback, or leave a properly formed link in the comments so participants can check out your blog exercise task.
You can find more Blog Exercises on Lorelle on WordPress. This is a year-long challenge to help you flex your blogging muscles.
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