One of the most effective ways to connect with your audience is to weave trending topics across your editorial and social media calendar.
Not everything you post has to be related to a current event, but using trending topics strategically will allow you to ride the waves of demand on both search and social platforms.
Here are 14 of the best sources to help you find the trend.
1. Google Trends
Google trends It is the gold standard for identifying popular research topics in your field.
It tracks global search trends and provides a wealth of data broken down by date range, geographic location, category, search type (eg web search vs. YouTube), and more.
One of the latest developments in Google Trends over the past two years is its integration into Google Search. Google has become a destination not only for entering a query but also for reading the latest trending stories based on your interests.
2. Explosive topics
This tool is useful for entrepreneurs, investors, or those looking to identify popular business ideas, categories, or companies.
explosive topics It doesn’t provide as much context as other popular topic tools, so you need to either subscribe to their newsletter or use this tool along with others to fully understand the trend.
3. SparkToro Trending
When Inbound.org closed, Sparktoro filled an important void for marketers.
SparkToro is trending Highlights the latest marketing, SEO, and technical articles.
Sparktoro highlights these trends based on the number of social shares from members who have connected to the tool (along with other means).
4. FrontPageMetrics
There is a Reddit thread for almost every area of interest. Frontpagemetrics.com It is useful for identifying which subreddits are experiencing the most daily, weekly and monthly growth.
With over 3 million subreddits tracked, there are plenty of rabbit holes to help inspire your content roadmap.
5. Feedly
Once you’ve identified the top publications or news sources your audience consumes, this tool is one of the best tools for aggregating all the latest news in one place.
feedly is one of the most powerful tools for identifying trending topics and staying current in your field by viewing the latest stories published from your curated list.
Feedly also has some valuable paid features like the ability to follow newsletters, Twitter, or Google News feeds. Or use its AI-powered bot that listens across the web for specific topics.
6. Podcast Notes
The podcast is an unsung champion in spotting trending topics. Podcasting is a billion dollar industry that is expected to earn 10% more listeners each year. This is a great opportunity to identify popular topics for your clients or your organization.
Unfortunately, podcasts take a lot of time and focus to digest the content and aren’t ideal for everyone.
Podcast Notes Resolves the problem of identifying key takeaways for individual podcasts in a quick newsletter format.
If you don’t have time to listen to more than 10 podcasts per week, Podcast News does the heavy lifting for you across fitness, nutrition, startups, technology, finance, crypto, and lifestyle topics.
7. Buzzsumo
The best community managers have well-stocked systems for listening in on popular social media topics in their field.
Buzzsumo It has long been one of the best tools in its class to help you identify viral content across social channels and has moved into additional areas of content discovery spanning video and Q&A sites as well.
If you are looking for the best trending video content in your industry, Buzzsumo can show you which content is getting the most attention on YouTube.
8. Trends.co
Trends.co Offers a comprehensive, easy-to-understand format for understanding new topics across industries. The Indicators newsletter breaks down a topic by covering:
- why does it matter.
- What is the problem that created this trend.
- the solution.
- Major players in the space.
- predictions.
- opportunities.
- Key lessons.
- Haters (or opposing views of the trend).
- Additional resources to go deeper into the topic.
There are also many paid features and ways to collaborate with other members of the ticker community, if you want more in-depth research on each topic.
This popular topics tool does the best job of providing enough context, resources, and background to understand more complex topics.
9. Trisympathetic
This tool identifies itself as Google Alerts for Google Trends. One of the challenges with Google Trends is that there isn’t a great way to subscribe to a particular topic.
Google Trends now offers this functionality but there are third-party solutions such as Trisympathetic It aims to create a better user experience and source from a variety of sources other than Google Trends.
10. Product research topics
Product Hunt It shows the latest new (mostly digital) products across industries, and anyone can submit theirs.
The PH community then votes and reviews them which determines how well the product ranks on the site.
Product Hunt topics allow you to sign up for a category of product releases that include productivity, developer tools, artificial intelligence, user experience, marketing, design, and the Internet of Things, to name a few.
11. Trend watchers
Similar to some of the previous popular topic tools, trend watchers It allows you to follow trends based on a category or keyword.
One of the unique features of Trendwatchers is that it combines trend data with types of Blog Topic Builder functionality.
This allows the user to select trending topics and then apply that trend to a word-good (also known as clickbait-y) style template.
12. Conference agendas
One of the best places to locate trending topics is by searching for conference and breakout sessions keywords in your industry.
Conference sessions are often led by subject matter experts who are often the influencers presenting new or popular topics.
13. Editorial calendars for publications
Like conference agendas, publications’ editorial calendars are often designed based on seasonal research trends that will resonate with their audience.
As you compile your content calendar for the year ahead, use your publication’s editorial calendars for inspiration or find trends you know will peak during seasonal or cultural moments.
14. Trendhunter
Finally, Trendhunter is one of the largest providers of trend data.
Fashion hunter is an informational brand that offers free trend data (in the form of articles) and also has many other offerings including personalized research, books, public speaking services, events, and more.
As you can see, there is no shortage of trend setters out there!
The best systems provide marketers with the ability to aggregate articles, newsletters, alerts, and moments of inspiration to build future campaigns.
How will these things work for you?
More resources:
- Top 10 tools for bulletproof SEO content strategies
- 25 Best SEO Writing Tools To Get More Traffic From Google
- Content Marketing: The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to What Works
Featured image credit: DG-Studio / Shutterstock
