How to Find What’s Trending: 14 Tools for Topic Inspiration
One of the most effective ways to connect with your audience is to weave trending topics throughout your editorial and social media calendar.
Not everything you publish has to be related to a current event but using trending topics strategically will allow you to ride waves of demand in both search and social platforms.
Not everything you publish has to be related to a current event but using trending topics strategically will allow you to ride waves of demand in both search and social platforms.
Here are 14 of the best sources to help you find out what’s trending.
1. Google Trends
Google Trends is the gold standard for identifying trending search topics in your industry.
It tracks global search trends and provides a wealth of data broken down by date range, geo-location, category, search type (for example web search vs. YouTube), and more.
One of the more recent advancements of Google Trends over the last couple of years is its incorporation into Google Search. Google has become a destination not only for inputting a query but also for reading the most recent trending stories based on your interests.
2. Exploding Topics
This tool is useful for entrepreneurs, investors, or those looking to identify trending business ideas, categories, or companies
Exploding Topics doesn’t provide as much context as other trending topic tools, so you either need to subscribe to their newsletter or use this tool in conjunction with other tools to fully understand the trend.
3. SparkToro Trending
When Inbound.org shut down, Sparktoro filled an important void for marketers.
Sparktoro Trending surfaces the latest trending marketing, SEO, and technology articles.
Sparktoro surfaces these trends based on the number of social shares from members who’ve connected to the tool (along with other means).
4. FrontPageMetrics
There’s a Reddit thread for virtually every area of interest. Frontpagemetrics.com is useful for identifying which subreddits are seeing the most daily, weekly, and monthly growth.
With over 3 million tracked subreddits, there are plenty of rabbit holes to help inspire your content roadmap.
5. Feedly
Once you’ve identified the most important publications or news sources that your audience consumes, this tool is one of the best for aggregating the latest stories in one place.
Feedly is one of the most powerful tools for identifying trending topics and staying up to date in your industry by showing you the most recent 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 certain topics.
6. Podcast Notes
Podcasts are an unsung hero in identifying trending topics. Podcasting is a $1 billion industry expected to gain 10% more listeners each year. This is a huge opportunity for identifying trending topics for your clients or organization.
Unfortunately, podcasts take a lot of time and focus to digest the content and aren’t ideal for everyone.
Podcast Notes solves the problem of identifying the key takeaways of individual podcasts in a quick newsletter format.
If you don’t have time to listen to 10+ podcasts a week, Podcast News does the heavy lifting for you across fitness, nutrition, startups, technology, finance, crypto & lifestyle topics.
7. Buzzsumo
The best community managers have well-polished systems for listening to trending social media topics for their vertical.
Buzzsumo has long been one of the best-in-class tools for helping you identify viral content across social channels and has moved into additional areas of content discovery that span across video and Q&A websites, as well.
If you’re looking for the top trending video content in your vertical, Buzzsumo can show you what content is getting the most traction on YouTube.
8. Trends.co
Trends.co offers a thorough but easy-to-digest format for understanding new topics across industries. The Trends newsletter breaks down a topic by covering:
- Why it matters.
- What the problem is that has created the trend.
- The solution.
- The main players in the space.
- Predictions.
- Opportunities.
- Key lessons.
- Haters (or opposing viewpoints of the trend).
- Additional resources to go deeper on the topic.
There are also several paid features and ways to collaborate with other members in the Trends community, if you want more in-depth research on each topic.
This trending topic tool does the best job of giving context, resources, and adequate background to understand more complex topics.
9. Treendly
This tool identifies itself as the Google Alerts for Google Trends. One of the challenges with Google Trends is that traditionally there hasn’t been a great way to subscribe to a specific topic.
Google Trends does offer this functionality now but there are third-party solutions like Treendly that aim to create a better user experience and source from a broader variety of sources beyond Google Trends.
10. Product Hunt Topics
Product Hunt surfaces the latest new (mostly digital) products across industries, and anyone can submit their product.
