One of the most effective ways to engage with your audience is to incorporate trending topics into your editorial and social media calendars.
Not everything you post has to be related to current events, but using trending topics strategically allows you to drive search waves across search and social platforms.
Here are 14 of the best resources to help you discover trends.
7. Buzzsumo
The best community managers have sophisticated systems for listening to trending social media topics for their industry.
Buzzsumo has long been one of the best-in-class tools to help you identify viral content on social channels and has moved into additional content detection areas, including video and Q&A sites.
If you’re looking for the most popular video content in your industry, Buzzsumo can show you the most popular content on YouTube.
6. Podcast Notes
Podcasts are the unsung heroes of identifying hot topics. Podcasting is a $1 billion industry estimated to gain 10% more listeners yearly. This is a great opportunity to identify hot topics for your customers or business.
Unfortunately, podcasts take up much time and attention and aren’t ideal for everyone.
Podcast Notes solves the problem of identifying key insights from each podcast in a quick bulletin format.
If you don’t have time to listen to more than 10 podcasts a week, Podcast News will cover topics like fitness, nutrition, startups, technology, finance, crypto, and lifestyle.
5. Feedly
Once you’ve identified the top posts or news sources your audience is subscribed to, this tool is one of the best for gathering the latest news in one place.
Feedly is one of the most powerful tools to identify trending topics and stay up to date with your industry by displaying the latest stories published by your curated list.
Feedly also has valuable paid features such as following newsletters, Twitter or Google News feeds. Or use AI-based bots that listen for specific topics on the internet.
4. FrontPageMetrics
There are Reddit threads for almost every area of interest. Frontpagemetrics.com is helpful in identifying which subreddits have the highest daily, weekly, and monthly growth.
With over 3 million subreddits following, there are plenty of rabbit holes to help inspire your content roadmap.
3. SparkToro Trending
When Inbound.org closed, Sparktoro filled an important gap for marketers.
Trending Sparktoro features the latest trending articles on marketing, SEO and technology.
Sparktoro recognizes this trend based on the number of social shares members have (among other things) interacted with the tool.
2. Exploding Topics
This tool is useful for entrepreneurs, investors or those who want to identify trending business ideas, categories or companies.
Exploding Topics don’t provide as much context as other trending topic tools, so you’ll need to subscribe to their newsletter or use this tool with other agencies to understand trends fully.
1. Google Trends
Google Trends is the gold standard for identifying trending search topics in your industry.
It tracks global search trends and offers a wealth of data broken down by time period, geographic location, category, search type (e.g., web search vs. YouTube) and more.
One of the most recent improvements to Google Trends over the last few years is its inclusion in Google Search. Google has become the destination not only for typing search queries, but also for reading breaking news stories based on your interests.
