How to Use Social Media Trends Without Losing Your Brand Strategy

Scroll through Instagram for five minutes, and you’ll see the same trends repeated by dozens. Same audio. Same format. Same visual idea. It's usually hype to get views and get noticed.

Yet every once in a while, one of those posts does something different: it doesn’t just make you notice the content. It tells a deeper story. That difference has very little to do with the trend itself. It comes from knowing what you want the trend to communicate before you ever use it.

That is exactly what happened when I saw the “kinda chic” trend. I wasn’t interested in recreating it simply because it was current. What caught my attention was the structure behind it: a few casual words could take something familiar and make people see its value differently. For a community organization, that opened up a much more interesting question. Could we use a lightweight social media trend not to promote another program, but to help people understand what belonging to this community actually gives them?

That became the strategy.

The trend itself is simple: take something ordinary, familiar, or slightly unexpected and describe it with a casual confidence that suddenly makes it feel worth noticing. I liked the format immediately, not because “kinda chic” has anything inherently to do with Jewish community life, but because I could see how the framework could help an organization articulate something that traditional promotional marketing often misses.

So much community marketing focuses on what is happening. We announce the youth program, promote the women’s event, post the holiday schedule, and ask people to volunteer. We make sure the date is prominent, the registration link works, and the program details are clear. All of that information matters, but logistics alone rarely explain why someone should care enough to participate. When every message revolves around what is being offered, an organization can unintentionally begin to look like a collection of programs rather than a community people want to belong to.

That was the opportunity I saw in this trend. Instead of using “kinda chic” simply to make the organization sound fun or current, we used it as a way to uncover the value underneath what the organization was already doing. We stripped away the event language and asked a different question: What is someone actually receiving from this experience? Once we began there, the messaging changed.

A youth program, for example, is not valuable simply because children have somewhere to go on a Sunday afternoon. Its deeper value may be the confidence and pride a child develops in knowing who they are and where they come from. That became: “It’s kinda chic to unlock pride in the next generation.” The statement still feels light enough to fit the trend, but the message underneath it is much bigger than the program itself.

The same was true for a women’s gathering. We could have highlighted the speaker, the refreshments, or the monthly schedule, but those details are not necessarily what makes someone come back. Often, the real value is having a place where women can gather, feel understood, and build relationships with people who strengthen their lives. So instead of promoting the event, the campaign said: “It’s kinda chic to gather with women who lift you up.” The program did not change. The way we communicated its value did.

Even tradition itself could be positioned differently. Organizations sometimes feel pressure to make ancient practices seem newer or more contemporary in order to make them relevant. But in this campaign, the contrast became part of the message: “It’s kinda chic to celebrate ancient traditions in the middle of a modern city.” We were not apologizing for tradition or trying to disguise it as something else. We were showing that its depth is precisely what makes it meaningful in a world that constantly moves on to the next thing.

Community care offered another example. Rather than posting another generic request to donate, volunteer, or support a cause, we focused on the very human act at the center of that work: one person noticing that another person needs them and showing up. That became: “It’s kinda chic to show up directly at someone’s doorstep.” Suddenly, the message was not about an organizational initiative. It was about the kind of community people have an opportunity to help create.

That is where this particular trend became useful. It gave us a modern language for communicating experiences that were already happening every day but were not always visible in the marketing. The campaign did not invent the warmth, pride, connection or care. Those things were already part of the organization. Our job was to make them easier for someone on the outside to recognize.

Great marketing does not manufacture meaning around an organization that does not have it. It identifies the meaning that already exists and communicates it clearly enough that other people can see themselves inside it. That is why simply copying a trend rarely accomplishes very much. Two organizations can use the exact same format and create completely different results depending on whether they begin with the trend or begin with the truth they are trying to communicate.

For this campaign, that truth ultimately led us back to something far more lasting than “kinda chic.” Trends will continue to change. The phrases, fonts, audios, and visual styles that fill our feeds today will eventually be replaced by something else. But helping a child feel pride in who they are, creating spaces where people form meaningful relationships, caring for someone when they need it, and passing traditions from one generation to the next are not temporary ideas.

Before borrowing the next trend format that appears in your feed, ask what it can help your audience understand about your organization that a standard event flyer cannot.

Ask what truth sits underneath the program you are promoting. Ask what someone should feel, understand, or value differently after seeing the post.

If the only answer is that the trend might get more views, it probably is not enough.

But if the format helps you communicate something real about your values, your community, or the experience you are creating for the people you serve, then the trend has a purpose beyond being current. It becomes a tool for making the invisible parts of your organization visible.

And that is the difference between following a trend and using one strategically.

Trends can get attention. Intentional marketing gives that attention something meaningful to connect to.

-Make It Matter