Your team is struggling to keep up with industry trends. What are you doing to help them?

To support my team in keeping up with industry trends, I prioritize continuous learning through workshops, webinars, and courses. I foster a culture of knowledge sharing, encourage research and analysis, and cultivate partnerships with industry experts. Cross-functional collaboration allows us to leverage diverse perspectives, while experimentation and innovation drive adaptation to emerging trends. A feedback loop ensures relevance, and investment in professional development empowers team members. We utilize trend monitoring tools and engage in regular discussions to stay informed and proactive. Through these efforts, I ensure that my team remains agile, informed, and competitive in our rapidly evolving industry landscape.

Ensure that the team carves out time weekly, daily, monthly, etc for research. Give the team the time and patience to explore and analyze trends. There is very much a creative component in social media analysis. Creativity can’t be scheduled and if team members are working under tight deadlines with back to back meetings, the luxury to discover and research trends can seem like a waste of time better used on other tasks. Additionally, having set deadlines, guidelines, and objectives for researching trends is important for prioritization.

An easy, free way to do this is to make social media plug-and-play for your team. We send a monthly calendar with what content will be posted on what day (ex. Monday the 5th will be a reel showing an amenity space, Wednesday the 14th will be a carousel highlighting the maintenance team). Then, we ask them for the requirements for that post (ex. Hey team, we need a video of an amenity space by Tuesday the 4th). This gives us time to schedule the post or provide further feedback and get revisions. It's fun to see how our 7 teams all bring such different ideas to the table with the same prompt, too!

Provide forums to share and discuss trends. This can be a weekly meeting dedicated to sharing insights, inviting experts, and viewing webinars. This forum can serve as a place to share and learn from each other, thought experts, and industry professionals. Additionally, enable each team member to become subject matter experts and allow them to take ownership of specific topics such as specific platforms, niches, or trend types. This can foster more independence and thought leadership amongst the team while being time effective.

Investing in your local association is a great resource. Between the webinar and in-person education, they are a valuable resource to learn from industry experts. Additionally, they are great for networking opportunities. Additionally, multifamily provides a wealth of free knowledge and inspiration, from webinars to podcasts, on everything from social media to AI to ESG to maintenance. Creating a calendar of topics and free webinars and podcasts on those different topics with links to register or watch the recording allows teams flexibility and gives them opportunities to stay on top of a variety of trends.

I always recommend to use the platform you would use most on your own. So if you're a big twitter user, follow industry accounts there. If you never check your email, subscribing to a bunch of newsletters won't be helpful. Just about every industry leading publication pushes their content out across social platforms, blogs, emails, video etc.

Reignite Your Social Media Groove: 1. Experiment Lab: Test new formats (short-form videos, interactive polls) with a dedicated budget. This sparks fresh content and gauges audience response. 2. Data-Driven Decisions: Use analytics (engagement, reach, clicks) to measure experiment success. Track conversations, reach beyond your circle, and learn from flops. 3. Embrace Learning: Analyze failures (e.g., unengaging product video) to adapt your strategy. 4. Stay Ahead of the Curve: Follow industry trends and thought leaders and attend conferences to adapt new ideas to your brand. 5. Foster Collaboration: Encourage team input on experiments and brainstorm new tactics together. This fuels a culture of continuous learning and innovation.

Reframe it for them. Explain that even the journalist who cover trends can't keep up with them. The issue isn't keeping up with them. It is how do you stay away from them. Once a trend becomes general knowledge it is too late. Focus on creating trends. Not following them.

Do market research and be inspired from the resources available, be it courses, e-learning platforms or educational pages: there would be some inspiration in every little aspect!