Trending vs. Evergreen Content: Scheduling Posts Like a Pro

A quick guide on how to not burn yourself out while keeping up with the competition.

There’s a lot of content on the Internet. And I mean a lot.

According to LocalIQ, there are roughly 66,000 new photos and videos shared on Instagram, 3.47 million YouTube videos watched (dwarfed by TikTok’s 625 million), and 3.5 billion messages on SnapChat sent every minute.

With the sheer volume and speed of content being produced, keeping up with trends can feel impossible. From demure to hawk tuah, it’s exhausting trying to keep up as a consumer, let alone as a content creator.

If you want to keep your content relevant, how do you stop yourself from burning out? While some influencers love being online and can capitalize on trends quickly, what about the rest of us who want to create but don’t have that kind of energy?

Don’t worry. You can make content at your own pace and still be very successful. Let’s explore how.

Trending vs. Evergreen Content

When it comes to speed, there are two kinds of content:

• Trending content: topics that are relevant to a specific point in time. Whether that’s now, the past few days, or even something cyclical like seasonal content, its relevance (and, thus, its value) is tied to a specific point in time.

• Evergreen content: topics whose relevance isn’t tied to a specific point in time. This post is a good example of that; unless our understanding of content relevance changes, this post will stay relevant for the foreseeable future.

For your content strategy to be successful, you need to learn how to blend both, leveraging trends to reinforce the relevance and value of evergreen topics.

For instance, Amazon’s new Fallout show — something that was trending earlier this year — not only introduced a much broader audience to the world of the Fallout game series (which has been around since the late 90s), but prompted a bunch of gamers to buy or redownload their favorite Fallout games.

Notice how these user trends coincide between the Fallout show’s release in April 2024 and game activity on Steam (via Steam Charts) for Fallout, Fallout 4, and Fallout 76: 

If you look closely, you’ll see Fallout 76’s all-time concurrent player count peak around the time of the show’s release. Indeed, trending topics can breathe new life into content that’s been around for years.

So how do you apply this to your own campaigns and create a content strategy that’s useful but doesn’t burn you out?

Understanding Your Goals Before You Plan

I was inspired by my buddy Danny’s post about common mistakes people make when planning out their monthly content calendars. Just as I’m a fan of evergreen content, Danny’s a master when it comes to the trending social media space.

Whether you’re creating trending or evergreen content, it’s not just about understanding what you want to create, but why and for whom. Without thinking deeper about the pieces of the content puzzle, you’re liable to be shelved into the “Hello, fellow kids” section of irrelevance, joining a trend too late or failing to connect with your audience at all.

Let’s break this down further to give you a good scaffold to build your content plan on:

• Who are you trying to serve? Are you a comedian that wants to make people laugh or a subject matter expert that wants to share your knowledge? Are you a real estate agent that specializes in helping first-time homebuyers or a gamer that loves history and wants to entertain people who share those interests? Before you create any content, know who it’s for.

• Where do they hang out? Different people hang out in different places at different times. As a Millennial, I spend a lot of time on Instagram but have never installed TikTok. Gen Z might have a lot of strong opinions about that, preferring the latter. Regardless, be present where your audience is and know why they’re there (LinkedIn, for instance, is for work mode, whereas TikTok and Instagram are for not-work mode).

• How active do you want to be on social media? I love content but sitting on social media for too long drains my introverted soul. Conversely, people who are more extroverted get a lot of enjoyment out of engaging online for hours on end. Social media is a great growth engine but be honest about your own willingness to use it so you can find the right balance. Come to terms that you’ll need to be present in some capacity, but it doesn’t have to exhaust you.

• What kind of content do you want to create? If you love writing about or reacting to the news, you might lean more towards trending content. If you’re like me and prefer longer educational guides, evergreen might be your strength. Still, find the right balance between both of them. For example, I’ll create longer videos on my gaming YouTube and then chop them up into shorts I can post when that game is trending for whatever reason to capture attention and bring it back to my evergreen content.

• What kind of growth do you want? Some people want millions of followers, some want a tight-knit group of maybe a few hundred. Growth is important, but numbers for their own sake isn’t worth the bragging rights — especially if it waters down what makes you interesting since trying to appeal to everyone has you appeal to no one. If you choose a number, know why you’re choosing it beyond “big number make happy.”

Examples of Trending and Evergreen Content

The following examples are two channels that focus mainly on short-form content. The key difference is one focuses mostly on trending content whereas the other prefers evergreen content.

Trending

One of my favorite news-related content creators is Inside Geopolitics. Not only do they create insightful shorts on Instagram (where I found them) and TikTok, but they’re starting to create long-form deep dives based on current events they cover. As their name implies, they explain geopolitical news and its potential short- and long-term impacts with stunning visuals not unlike a Call of Duty loading screen.

Though their content gets its value in timeliness, the long-form content adds some extra shelf-life to their topics as news shifts to archival history. As a history nerd myself, it’ll be interesting to come back to some of their pieces a year or two to verify the accuracy of their predictions.

Evergreen

Conversely, another favorite evergreen creator is Astartes Anonymous, a YouTube channel that covers various parts of Warhammer 40K lore. With daily shorts, it doesn’t really matter what they’re talking about or when they post. Since this is all sci-fi, it’s already divorced from our timeline; for instance, his short on Basilio Fo feels just as fresh now as it was when he posted it months ago.

Though Danny warns in his article that you shouldn’t spend a ton of time creating big content calendars — especially if you’re focused on trending content on social media — Astartes Anonymous has more maneuverability to create a calendar since timeliness isn’t as big of a factor.

I do something similar with my gaming community’s YouTube shorts: I choose a game or theme I want for the week, go through footage, clip out some shorts, and then schedule them all out in a single afternoon. No, it’s not a super high production but my goal right now is to give myself breathing room to produce content at the speed I want to post.

If you want to get a feel for how I pace myself, the header for this post is my current publishing schedule for this very newsletter. Below are the deadlines I set for myself, aiming for six posts a week while only publishing five.

This will give me some extra space so I don’t have to produce at a breakneck speed; over time, I’ll be a week or two ahead of schedule, giving me some room to further improve my content’s quality as well as my processes producing it.

No matter what you choose, being consistent in quality and volume is what enables you to build an audience.

It’ll take some trial and error but as long as you keep creating, you’ll find the pacing and content type that’s right for you and your audience. So don’t be afraid to try, stumble, dust yourself off, and find the pace that works for you.

Whether you’re a trending topic sprinter or an evergreen marathon runner, the only way you’ll grow is moving forward at the pace that best suits you.