Trending is a term used to describe the topics, photos, videos, hashtags, and other content that are most popular on social media at a given time. Trends are often reflective of a social media community’s interests and discussions, but they can also be influenced by current events, viral content, holidays or other occasions, or online challenges and campaigns.
Understanding trends is important for businesses looking to create effective digital marketing strategies. Trends can help identify what topics are currently resonating with people and which ones might be worth further investigation. Trending also helps to ensure that a business’s social media content is relevant and up to date.
There are several tools available to find trends including the Google Trends tool, Buzzsumo’s Topics tool, and Twitter’s own ‘trending’ feature. Google Trends scans the Internet for information about particular keywords or topics and displays them in a visual, geographically-based interface. Trends can be categorized by topic, region, country, or domain and are ranked according to their popularity.
Buzzsumo Topics has a similar interface to Google Trends and displays the most popular topics from a selected category at any given time. Topics are ranked by their popularity on both Facebook and Twitter, as well as the number of shares and views they have received. Buzzsumo Topics can also be filtered by keywords, so it’s easy to view the most recent trends related to your industry.
Twitter’s Trending is a great way to see what people are discussing and searching for in real-time. However, a business should be wary of jumping on the bandwagon and posting content about irrelevant topics. This can draw ire from users and, in the worst cases, lead to account suspension.
Another issue with using Twitter’s Trending is that trends can disappear very quickly. It’s important to keep a close eye on the trend and use a tool like Tweet Binder or TrackMyHashtag to monitor it regularly. This will help you to know when the trend is reaching its peak and also avoid posting content that might get deleted.
SparkToro Trending is a great tool for marketers who want to stay up to date on new trends. It lists links to popular content, but it’s not the most efficient method for finding specific trends because you have to either hope that the trend is in the title or read through each article to find it. It’s also a good resource for finding trends that have a more local context.
Exploding Topics is a free tool that allows you to search its database of 13,000 manually-vetted trends. You can filter the results by keyword, category, or status (Explosing, Peaked, or Regular) and see the growth rate of each trend over time. You can also save a trend to a Project, which lives within the main dashboard, so you can easily monitor it in the future.