Top Tools to Find Trending Topics Online
Trending topics are a vital tool when it comes to creating content that is up to date, ever-intriguing, and informative to your audience. As a copywriter, making use of a currently popular topic is a powerful key to success when it comes to creating content relevant, and including essential keywords. It’s about becoming a chosen source of information for your readers.
Most importantly, trending topics are about staying relevant to what you write about and what you provide to your readers. Say you write about flowers, and so have a following of flower-enthusiasts. News of a new species of rose will surely be of interest to your readers. Taking that information and relaying it into your content will benefit your followers.
But in an online world overflowing with information relayed by the millisecond, it can be challenging to sift through all of the latest trends. To get to what engages you and your audience, it can take a bit of research. Thankfully some platforms layout trends for us to sift through.
Here are the best tools (in no particular order) that you can use to keep relevant and update your followers with trending information.
Twitter is still the best way to find current trends and peoples’ attitudes towards them. It’s a powerful tool that is made easy to use for all to see the latest trending hashtags. Twitter trending hashtags are created by people who use Twitter. The more mentions a hashtag gets, the higher up on the trending page it is.
Twitter will give you current updates on political and cultural trends. You also have the flexibility to search for global or national trends to narrow down your search. It’s a great way to find out how people are reacting to specific trends and use that to form how you will write.
Reddit is incredibly popular for commenting and debating trending topics. The Reddit homepage will give you a crystal clear idea of what is trending at the moment in time.
Reddit also gives you the freedom to search specific topics of interest and see what is trending within that topic. These topic pages are called subreddits. If a subject matter exists, there is a subreddit page for it.
The way a subreddit works is the more “upvotes” a post has, the higher up on the subreddit page it will appear. So, you only have to look at the homepage of a subreddit to know what’s current and trending.
Google Trends
Google Trends is a fantastic tool for blog writers and SEO-specialists alike. If you own a website, manage a site, do any online marketing, you have at least heard of Google Trends. It allows you to search for keywords/terms and see how they are trending on Google, Google News, and Youtube.
Not only can you custom search words and see how they are trending, but google provides you with geographical information on the term, similar searches, graphs on trends over time, and a tool to compare different search terms.
The Google Trends front page will give you information on the latest trending search terms as well as search term trends over the years.
Use Google Trends to garner keywords for your blogs and articles. It truly is a powerful tool as it gives insight into search engine optimisation for your content because we would all love to rank first on search results.
Buzzfeed
Most of us have a love-hate relationship with Buzzfeed. They seem to be a mixture of 90% clickbait quizzes and 10% accessible viral content. It can be hard to sift through, but they can be a good source of online culture trends. The blue or gold dress phenomenon was made famous by a Buzzfeed article.
If you are about keeping up to date with the latest memes or celebrity information, then Buzzfeed will give you insight into trends on their homepage. Buzzfeed keeps a sidebar of their trending articles on the side of their website, making it very simple to navigate. You will also learn a thing or two about forming your article titles from Buzzfeed. Buzzfeed articles are certainly made to make people click on their titles — and they work.
Youtube Trending Page
If you write about pop culture and media, then Youtube is an excellent tool for you. The Youtube trending page can help you gain insight into what the latest trend in online media is. There is a massive following on Youtube — it just so happens to be the second largest search engine in the US. Their trending page is in categories based on gaming, news, music, movie, fashion, and more. Use Youtube Trends to keep up-to-date on what people are watching and commenting on.
Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo is an excellent source of information for trending topics and key influencers at the time of searching. All you have to do is type in a key term, search phrase, or domain and Buzzsumo summarises all the stats on articles for you. These stats include the amount of Facebook engagement, Twitter and Pinterest shares, Reddit engagements, and a total engagement number.
The homepage displays all the top current trending articles along with subcategories that you can peruse. Buzzsumo is a fantastic tool to see how similar materials written are performing across social media platforms. It’s also super easy to use. Unfortunately, Buzzsumo is not a free resource, but you can try it out for free.
Quora
If you are looking for answers, then Quora is the place. Quora is a platform for users to ask questions and receive answers from other users. If you are ever wondering what most people are wondering then Quora is a great tool.
The homepage features trending questions and subcategories to follow and keep up with your niche audience and what they are asking. It’s a fantastic source for thinking up ideas for content and for targeting those questions that get typed into search engines.
Pinterest is a great source for sharing content. It’s a search platform filled with pictures that link to source pages and is popular amongst blog creators. Pinterest shares its monthly trends for advertisers to inform creators what’s working. It can be a little challenging to navigate as a content creator for trends as it bases your results on your search history.
Your market leaders
What is a better source of trends than the industry market leaders in your niche? You can gain knowledge of what’s trending by looking at what they are reporting on to their similar audience. Gaining an understanding of who your audience might be following and looking at their current content will give you insight into what’s trending in that particular niche.
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