One of the key success factors in marketing is the ability of a marketer to seize a certain moment – jumping on a trending item that will resonate with their audience, and repackaging it so it’s relevant to the reader.
We’re all individuals, and what we like could be totally different to our friends. But if people are interested in your blog, they are interested in you, and what you’re interested in. If something is trending that you know they will love, it’s easy to capitalise on that for the benefit of your followers. Here are a few places you can keep tabs on the pulse of what’s new and interesting on the internet, so you can bring your audience the latest.
Where to find trending topics and keywords for your blog
While a decade ago it would have been difficult to find such trends in real time, internet has now made it very easy to locate the live trends and come up with smart content to cash in on the same. So, let us have a look at a few tools and methods for locating the accurate trends for you.
1. Twitter
It hardly needs introduction! While the idea has existed for a long time, Twitter brought it to public attention by directly listing current trends on their homepage and profile pages. It is still the best way to find out the present political and cultural trends as well as the mood of a nation. You can check global trends or look for country specific trends as per your needs as you search the hashtags.
If you have the budget, you can also consider using “promoted trends” in Twitter. These hashtags will show up at the top of the list in the homepage of your target region. Include your brand name in the hashtag for the right impact.
2. Google Trends
Google has many services to provide analytics. Google Trends is the best option out of them to find trending topics. You can search any topic here and check out the volume it is receiving. You can also make country-specific as well as sector-specific searches to make the results more targeted.
You can explore in depth by clicking on the country name and then the state names to get completely localized details which will help you to find extremely targeted keywords for your focus market.
3. Social Mention
It is a smart tool that analyses content in a huge number of websites. It does not only limit itself to major networks like Twitter and Facebook but also goes through more than a 100 sites including the likes of Digg, YouTube, FriendFeed and basically anything that hosts user generated content to find out trending topics.
For any query, Social Mention also gives you a list of influencers, i.e. people who regularly post on one of the social networks on that topic and are popular with high number of followers and engagements. You can find potential collaborators and endorsers from this list.
4. Keyhole
Keyhole is an interesting tool that allows you to track hashtags across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. It just works like Google alerts, but for social media. So, you can set an alert for a certain topic and observe it on real time.
Use it as a defence mechanism for your brand, if necessary – If you have the resources, put one dedicated person to monitor all mentions of your brand in real time using this app and immediately respond to any issues or criticism.
5. Agorapulse
Agorapulse is mainly a tool for creating contests and other marketing campaigns on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. But it also lets you create customized queries for specific keywords on Twitter and identify the buzz around the same.
Its analytics clearly tells you which your best performing Tweets and FB posts are. Go through the posts in the recent weeks to get an idea about more popular topics and fine-tune your keyword list.
6. Buzzfeed
Buzzfeed grew simply by posting content on trending topics. So, you can rest assured that the people at Buzzfeed know how to find the right trends. The good thing is that they also display Buzzfeed trends for everyone to see on the right hand side of the homepage and so you can easily find out how to your trends through this site.
Buzzfeed’s trending topics are mostly in the shape of listicles. What you can draw from here is not only keyword ideas and topics but the most effective way of framing the titles. This site works simply because it can make people click on the links. You learn it too.
7. Reddit
Reddit is a hugely popular site where everyday people are having heated debates on every topic under the sun. The topics can be voted up or down on the site and so the ones with most “upvotes” only are seen on the homepage. So, in a way, one look at the Reddit homepage can give you a very good idea about what is trending right now.
The best way to exploit Reddit is to discover subreddits i.e. instead of just exploring the homepage, find subpages that are dedicated to specific topics and offer more specific insights. You can directly search for subreddits based on your topic of interest here.
8. Topsy
Topsy is another tool for smart marketers. It allows you to search for topics in a targeted manner. For instance you can even search for trends on a certain date, time or place. You can set alerts, monitor and analyse all the trends to figure out existing social sentiment towards them.
For instance, suppose you have a plan for a campaign focused on the next Christmas. So, you can just go to Topsy and look for the trends from the last few years’ Christmas to find out useful keywords. Such date specific search would have been a nightmare with most other tools.
Conclusion
All these tools discussed above have their own USPs. In order to make the most of them, you should stick to a few that give regular results relevant to you.
Born in Los Angeles, Blair Strasser is a business and marketing enthusiast that enjoys sharing his knowledge through his writing. He is also Founder and CEO of eMerchantBroker and passionate about technology. @BlairStrasser
I have used BuzzFeed, Twitter and Agorapulse to find relevant keywords and topics that can in return get more visits for my website. Looks like, I was missing something. This post has some more ideas for using these sites to find relevant keywords. I will try these techniques to see if they work for me.
Hi,
You have some winners here.
I rarely trend hop but check Twitter and Topsy sometimes to see what’s hot and popping. What the kids in my niche are talking about these days ;)
Ryan
I really hear a lot of people who talk about getting keywords from Google Trends but I have not be lucky enough to find one, just a lot of difficult to rank keywords
Tried Buzzfeed unfortunately it doesn’t work as much as I hoped it would.
Google still is the best one that does the trick for me .
I’m a Social Media Manager and I’m always looking for new content to post for my clients. This was very helpful. Thanks for the info
One of my favorite ways to find good content topics is to utilize Feedly. It’s a simple feed reader but allows you to organize content by category. You can then add all the popular sites in your niche and you have a constant feed of awesome topics.
If you want to take it to the next level you create a swipe file of headlines that you find in Feedly that are awesome. Keep all those headlines in a Google doc. Next time you go to create content you have endless ideas to choose from. I work on adding to my swipe file about 5 minutes everyday. That way I always have great topics for content!
One of the key success factors in marketing is the ability of a marketer to seize a certain moment – jumping on a trending item that will resonate with their audience, and repackaging it so it’s relevant to the reader. We’re all individuals, and what we like could be totally different to our friends.
1. Twitter
It hardly needs introduction! While the idea has existed for a long time, Twitter brought it to public attention by directly listing current trends on their homepage and profile pages. It is still the best way to find out the present political and cultural trends as well as the mood of a nation. You can check global trends or look for country specific trends as per your needs as you search the hashtags.
If you have the budget, you can also consider using “promoted trends” in Twitter. These hashtags will show up at the top of the list in the homepage of your target region. Include your brand name in the hashtag for the right impact.
2. Google Trends
Google has many services to provide analytics. Google Trends is the best option out of them to find trending topics. You can search any topic here and check out the volume it is receiving. You can also make country-specific as well as sector-specific searches to make the results more targeted.
You can explore in depth by clicking on the country name and then the state names to get completely localized details which will help you to find extremely targeted keywords for your focus market.
Hello,
To be very frank there were 2 in the list of which I didn’t knew before reading the post and those are : Social Mention and Keyhole. Thank you for bringing this list and for letting me know about them also. Will check them out right now.
Thanks,
Karan
keywords really help in increasing traffic.
Thank you for the helpful information and great post, I still believe Google and social media are the two best ways to find such keywords and relevant results. Thanks again for the great post.
Hi Darren, I mainly use the first 3 and have never considered using Keyhole I will give it a go! Might want to remove Topsy though as I believe Apple have canned it :-)
i think at the 1st place have to be keep an eye on your competitors
cool keyword research very effective, as for me, and i recommend something like semrash or k-meta.com
I’m still rather new to social media, so this article was very helpful. However, with respect to Twitter, how do you search for all the available hashtags?
Nice sharing. Trending topics is really helpful to get more benefits. I generally use Quora, Reddit, and Google keyword planner to find the trending topics. Thanks for your excellent article.
Nice point. But, Is these are works for India country also.
Few of the above tools are already in implementation while I came across some which I would love to use. Thanks for the share!
this tools are really good with me. i think it will support me
Thanks for sharing. I found BuzzSumo along with Ubersuggest work well too. I think Google recently cracked down on adwords planner so it’s not free to use anymore. bummer.