Social media marketers know the key to reaching a broad audience is through an understanding of what it is their targeted audience wants to see. To remain relevant, note-worthy and timely, you’ll have to do a bit of research to find out what those wants are. Doing so will help you better comment on the trending topics and become part of a greater conversation. Detection and analysis of trending topics offer valuable insights into the topics that attract the attention of a large fraction of users. Public opinions in form of trends are interesting not only for individuals, but also for brands pointing to fast-evolving news stories, brand image monitoring and bench marking.
One of the greatest ways to do this, is to take advantage of trending topics on multiple social media platforms, which, luckily, make it easy for you to determine the data you need. By better understanding your audience, you’ll be able to create content that interacts with them and brings your message to the forefront.
Here’s a list of the best places on the internet to gather trending topics data to help you become the trendiest spokesperson for your company:
1. Twitter
Twitter is one of the greatest platforms for discovering trending topics. It’s based in real-time and allows users to have more immediate interaction with one another and with topics of interest. There are lots of ways to locate the topics on Twitter, but I’d suggest trying Trendsmap.com.
Trendsmap.com shows the hot hashtags around the world. You can focus on your geographical location if you want, or you can make a comment on something else trending thousands of miles away from where you’re seated. You can choose different levels of visibility for your account. For a small fee, you’ll be able to see trend detail and history, allowing you to better navigate the social sphere.
2. Facebook
The “trending topics” section appear in the right-hand corner of a user’s News Feed and shows customized topics based on the user’s interests and computer-use. The difference between Facebook’s version and Twitter’s is that the topics share a brief description of why they are trendy. For example, if commercial construction company were listed, it would tell you what the company did to get the attention.
As a social media marketer, you’ll be able to take those trends and build content around them to make your Facebook page interactive and conversational. The only tricky part with this one is that Facebook is less “real” time than some of its competitors, making some of the trends less timely than those on other platforms.
3. Reddit
Reddit is the 6th most popular website on the planet and google trends show no sign of this coming down.Identifying treding topcs on reddit starts as simple as finding the subreddits that are already hosting discussions about your topics.
Here’s how you can find trending topics on reddit:
Use the search box at the top right of any page on Reddit to search for communities where your theme is discussed. Save the links for all of the relevant subreddits on a notepad, so you can start targeting these , one at a time. Next, using the search function, look for phrases that indicate that someone is struggling with something.Once you’ve chosen trending topics for your content, it’s time to dig deeper into the conversation so we can learn more about: the problems and solutions offered by other redditors. If you’ve completed each step, then you have everything you need for your next valuable piece of content.
4. Social Mention
One of the key tasks of content marketers is to spot trending topics of interest before competitors and certainly before the topic is saturated with content. Social Mention is a social media search engine that searches for keywords on social media platforms (blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, videos) and provides graphic illustrations or charts showing trending topics and mentions per day or week. What we find interesting about social mention is their ability to report of who is talking about the subject the most. In addition, the hashtag feature reports what, if any, popular hashtags are being used in association with your search query.
5. Instagram
The Explore tab located at the bottom of Instagram screen makes it easy to identify trending topics. Topic channels on Explore give you new ways to discover your interests on Instagram. Over 200 million people visit Explore every day to discover new ideas and find inspiration. Now it’s even easier to browse through posts you want to see and accounts you want to follow.
With topic channels, you can be more intentional about how you navigate posts on Explore. When you open the page, you’ll see a tray at the top with personalized channels. This includes a ‘For You’ channel, which has a mix of posts tailored to your interests. You’ll also see channels on topics you might like such as Art, Sports, Beauty or Fashion – as well as a list of hashtags, giving you more ways to explore your interests. Now, when you want to get inspired by the latest fashion trends or discover a new travel destination, you can easily find posts you’re looking for and follow those accounts or hashtags.
You can browse through a variety of interests by swiping from grid to grid, or you can go deep into a specific interest by tapping on a channel and scrolling up. If you’d like to remove a topic channel, press and hold the channel and select ‘Mute’ from the menu. This sends the channel to the end of the tray, giving you the option to unmute it at any time.
6. Google Trends
Google Trends is a great way to find out what people are looking at through the highly used search engine. The site gives you information on trending topics, how many searches accompanied a certain phrase, and where it came from around the world. It actually allows you to choose trending topics by country or globally, so it all depends on what sort of information you are looking for.
By finding out what your area is looking at the most, you’ll be able to approach the topic with a unique perspective and open a forum for your site visitors and potential clients to comment. By doing so, you’ll be creating a conversation and finding a deeper way to connect.
By finding out what your area is looking at the most, you’ll be able to approach the topic with a unique perspective and open a forum for your site visitors and potential clients to comment. By doing so, you’ll be creating a conversation and finding a deeper way to connect.
7. Watch that page
Sometimes you’d like to know when updates take place to an important Web page — say, your Wikipedia page or key pages on your competitors’ sites.You select which pages to monitor, and WatchThatPage will find which pages have changed, and collect all the new content for you. WatchThatPage offers email notification of changes that have occurred and will send changed text itself or notify you of broken pages. The application sends daily or weekly updates at a predefined time and offers a bookmarklet you can click on to add any page to your list of pages monitored. The app will filter for certain trending topics keywords, but appears to only work across all pages or none, not for particular pages.
8. Board reader
Boardreader is a forum search engine that helps search thousands of forums and statistically puts the number of forums on a graph to show topic popularity. It’s another search engine to use to try and get at opinions like Google Groups and Epinions. While many monitoring tools overlook the grey ares in web monitoring, board reader allows you to find vibrant communities that are worth being part of, in addition to monitoring trending topics and what’s being said about your brand
Here’s how to set up board reader tracking for your brand:
- Visit Boardreader.com.
- Type the search term that you wish to monitor in the search box and then click the Search button.
- Copy the UR from your browser address bar.
- Paste this URL into a document in which you list all the feeds that you plan to aggregate
9. Sprout social
Sprout Social lets you target and discover new customers or supporters, monitor your brand across the social Web, identify trending topics, organize your social networks and manage up to five identities with the basic plan. The service offers an easy-to-digest summary of what’s happening online around your social presence.Sprout social’s The smart inbox’s monitoring tools allow you to keep track of what people are saying about your industry and your brand.You can monitor for news items based on keywords, hashtags, locations, and more. To uncover and track trends, you can use this data to create customized reports.
In addition to these, sprout social also allows you uncover actionable insights via analytics and data tailored to what you want to know. You’ll get message-level insights, access to custom URL tracking, trending topics analysis based on tags you’ve used, and so on.
10. Keyhole
Keyhole lets you monitor hashtags, keywords and trending topics, and can track mentions and keywords across news, blogs and forums. The application discovers top posts in terms of engagement and recency, user demographics, percent of positive vs negative sentiments, and location.Keyhole uses AI to help brands predict how successful new hashtags they create will be and which is great for curating viral content. Your prospects are often seeking answers to pressing questions or product referrals and they’re likely to turn to social media and search by hashtag. Adding the right hashtag to your posts will help more of your prospects find your content.
11. Mention
Mention is an online reputation management and social media monitoring tool, Mention is more or less like Google Alerts on steroids. It will deliver results to your inbox, RSS feed or Web-based dashboard. Quickly monitor your reputation, check on trends and analyze media mentions for your brand. Mention gives the SMB user all of the analytics data for each alert in easy-to-read chart form on a single, scrollable page. The page wraps in geographic location, sentiment, listening, and influencer identification information, not just volume of mentions.
12. Quora
An easy way to generate a list of trending topics is to find questions with a lot of answers that relate to your brand,For instance, if you have a food blog, you can check out Quora for questions related to food or cooking. Identify related questions which are answered the most and see what these queries are about. Choose a topic around the same theme and this preliminary research will help you identify engaging blog topics to write about.
13. Buzzfeed
Buzzfeed is much more than cute puppies. Dig deeper and it’s trend section gives readers a look on trending topics that are popular including researched and fact checked news content. It also shows us what is in trend at the whole Internet at the current moment.By comparing certain attributes such as number of views, likes, comments, shares count for each hour or time interval after the video is uploaded, for both the type of videos, can help in understanding how a particular video navigates through YouTube’s algorithm steps and ends up in trending topics section while other does not appear in trending section.
14. YouTube trends
Trending page in YouTube helps viewers to see what’s happening in their region, which event or videos are people watching the most. Videos with wide range of viewers that find the video interesting are shown in Trending topics section. Like a new movie trailer or new song from known artist, some Trending videos are predictable. Other videos are surprising, and based on time, event and day of that video. Trending displays same list of Trending topics and videos to all users in each country, it does not show any personalized videos.
The list of videos in Trending section updates for every 15 minutes. With each update, videos can stay in the same position in the list, Move up or down. Users can’t pay to have their videos to shown in trending results that means trending videos are never sponsored.YouTube trending videos represent content that targets viewers attention over a relatively short time, and has the potential of becoming popular.When a video becomes popular, it is exposed to millions of users for free and has the opportunity of keeping their attention for a while. Finding these trends are significantly important that many different websites have been emerged just to pick up on the latest trends on the web, such as “buzzFeed” or “whatTheTrend”.
15. Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo is a great portal for identifying trending topics and sub topic areas. The skill is in identifying these early to build authority, then leverage news and trends once you’ve established yourself as a trusted source on the topic.
Ideally you want to spot new and emerging topics early before the topic becomes saturated with content. If you start at the left hand side of the chart below you
can build your reputation and authority. If you enter towards the right hand side when the topic is saturated with content you will struggle to gain traction without exceptional content.
Why You Should Be Familiar with Trending Topics
“THE FUTURE IS PRIVATE,” MARK ZUCKERBERG ANNOUNCED IN 2019, revealing his vision to unify Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp in response to global consumer demand for more intimate social experiences. Instagram launched Threads, a camera-first messaging app that allows users to connect with close friends in a dedicated, private space.And LinkedIn began rolling out its new Teammates feature to help users see more updates and content from people they work with in real life.
This is all part of an ongoing shift in social that has private channels in the spotlight, putting increasing pressure on brands to adapt. According to data from Global WebIndex, 63% of people say messaging apps are where they feel most comfortable sharing and talking about content.3 And half of the senior marketers polled in our 2020 Social Media Trends survey say that the shift to private social channels has made them rethink their content strategy.
But is the future of social media going to be entirely private, one-toone interactions? The rise of TikTok, IGTV, and continued growth of Twitter show that public content discovery and consumption remains a core use case for social—and the data backs this up. 52% of brand discovery online still happens in public social feeds. Finding trending topics, entertaining posts, reading news, and researching products—these are all major motivations for using social, just as central to customers’ experiences as private messaging.
The distinction between these two worlds is an opportunity, not an obstacle, as it creates a clear path for the full customer journey to take place on social. The most successful brands will be those that strike a purposeful balance between driving awareness on public feeds and delivering meaningful one-to-one engagement on private channels.
So, you’ve been given some resources, but what difference do they really make for your company or for your job as a social media marketer? The answer is completely up to you. By creating interesting content that speaks to trending topics your users are interested in, you’ll be able to better show how interested you and your company are in the larger picture. You’ll be able to create conversation and opportunities to show how you and the services you offer fit into that picture.