Every year there’s a new list of video trends, TikTok challenges, live shopping, whatever’s blowing up that quarter, and almost none of it applies to the DC association or nonprofit we’re actually working with. Here’s what’s genuinely shifting in this world, not what’s trending on a platform your members probably aren’t using anyway.
Captions have quietly gone from a nice extra to the default expectation. Most people scroll social media with the sound off, which means a video without captions is losing the majority of its audience in the first three seconds. This isn’t a trend so much as a baseline now, if your videos aren’t captioned, you’re already behind.
LinkedIn has become the real center of gravity for this kind of organization in a way it wasn’t a few years ago. Board members, funders, and industry peers are there in a way they’re genuinely not on TikTok or Instagram. A short, well-cut clip built specifically for LinkedIn, with captions and a clear point in the first five seconds, does more for an association’s credibility than the same clip repurposed from somewhere else and dropped in without a second thought.
The newest shift, and the one most people haven’t caught onto yet, is that video content increasingly needs to be discoverable by AI tools, not just human viewers. People are asking ChatGPT and Perplexity questions that used to go straight to Google, and a video with no transcript, no clear title, and no real description is invisible to that entire layer of search. A clean transcript and a genuinely descriptive summary aren’t just good practice for accessibility anymore, they’re what makes your content findable in a search landscape that’s changed more in the last two years than in the decade before it.
None of this requires chasing whatever’s trending on a platform your audience isn’t on. Caption everything, put real effort into LinkedIn specifically, and make sure what you publish is actually structured to be found. That’s the whole list, and it’ll do more than any influencer trend will.
Working on a video project in the DC area?
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