Trending Content vs Evergreen Content: What’s The Difference?

If you want people to engage with your content, you need to make sure it’s well-balanced. One way to keep content balanced is to consider a mixture of trending content and evergreen content, What is the difference between these two types of content? This post explains.

This type of content involves embracing topics that are temporarily very popular. Such topics typically include things like.

Recent news stories and current events
Emerging products and technologies
Viral memes
References to popular celebrities and media
Use of buzzwords and modern slang
Upcoming events and short-term predictions

Most content that is shared on social media is trending content. It is content that is designed to tap into people’s current desires. Such content has a limited life before it becomes dated and irrelevant. This makes it ideal for sharing on social media where it will disappear in a few days. However, this is unlikely to be the type of content you want to recycle or pin on your page.

Trending content is great for blogs too – it’s the type of content that will get lots of traffic from social media if you share it there. You can also feature links to trending blog content on your homepage, providing you get rid of this feature once it becomes irrelevant. Trending blog content is not so great for getting traffic via search engines – even if people are searching for certain terms, larger established sites and blogs will rank highest. However, a truly unique post on a trending topic may still rank highly.

When it comes to choosing trending topics, there are a few important things to consider trending content over evergreen and their difference:

Make sure trending content is relevant to your brand. Don’t just jump on any news story.
Be careful of embracing memes or modern slang that could harm your professionalism.
Be similarly careful with divisive topics – such as those regarding religions and politics. Taking a side could win you customers, but also lose you customers.
For inspiration, look at what terms and hashtags are trending on social media. You can also share viral content produced by other people.

What is evergreen content?

Evergreen content involves embracing topics that are forever popular. Such topics might include:

How-to guides on timeless skills (like poaching an egg or becoming a better leader)
History lessons
Case studies on past projects
Interviews
FAQs pages

Evergreen content is the type of content that can be recycled on social media to keep getting engagements. You can also pin it to your social media page for years without it becoming irrelevant.

Evergreen blog content will meanwhile keep bringing you traffic to your website. If you don’t have the time to upload any new blog content for a while, your evergreen content will help you to still attract visitors. Such content is great for SEO because of this – pages that get a consistent flow of traffic are more likely to rank highly.

There are a few important thing to consider when coming up with evergreen content over trending content and their differences:

As with trending content, make sure content is relevant to your brand.
Don’t settle for overly generic spins on topics. Because people are constantly creating content on these topics, you are having to compete with much more content – and therefore must make it stand out.
Avoid language or references that could become dated in a couple years. You may also want to avoid referencing the current year.
Blog posts can be edited to keep them evergreen. If a study you’ve referenced or a strategy you’ve mentioned is no longer relevant, simply replace it with relevant information.

Getting the right balance

By creating an equal amount of trending content and evergreen content, you can get steady engagements through different channels. Make a conscious effort to alternate between trending content and evergreen content to maintain a good balance of both.