Best Ways to Discover Trending Topics
What’s hot? What are the most popular topics being shared? Creating content around trending content can build entire businesses and feed the content-social-sharing mill that is on the Internet.
I’ve written about how to search out pre-qualified, “evergreen”, content ideas. This is how you find and research content ideas that can be used for organic traffic.
It can be hard to find content ideas that are prequalified for popular topics. BuzzFeed recognizes that there is more noise.
Website owners looking to stand out and keep up with the latest trends may not have access to a listening tool. They can still do extensive research to find the next topic.
You may have seen Twitter Trends or BuzzFeed Trending. There are many tools and resources that you can use to help you discover trending topics.
Trending Reddit + Subreddits
Despite the controversy at Reddit, it is still the “Front Page of the Internet”, as well as a source of a lot of content.
Reddit is an excellent tool for SEO and content marketing. However, I have not written anything about how to use it to discover trending topics.
Reddit defaults to showing trending topics. To see which topics have the highest velocity, you can sort Reddit and subreddits by topic to find out which posts have the most upvotes (by comments).
This is very powerful. You are late to the trending topic on Reddit FrontPage.
Subreddits with a focus on one topic are called hot topics. This is how you will find out the secrets to finding them.
Click the Hot button Woodworking for the most popular topics in the area. Explore the subreddits related to your niche to have tons of fun.
Would it be possible to search trending posts on trending subreddits? That would be very exciting.
It turns out you can. VisitRedditlist.com. Next look at the Activity and Growth columns to find sites that are publishing lots of content or growing rapidly. Finally, check out the Hot column.
This will show the most popular subreddits’ content. To see the most popular content, you can choose to view it in any other way.
Quick aside – For all these methods, but especially Reddit, you’re going to encounter a lot of noise and a lot of, what one might graciously call, “not-cool-at-all-content. “
Reddit does not filter or “make” the latest content. Moderators are volunteers. You can explore at your own risk.
Productivity tip: RSS feeds can be generated by all subreddits and searches.
Visit Redditlist and Reddit.
Trending Pinterest
Pinterest is an incredible platform. They offer great analytics and an excellent advertising platform for advertisers. We prefer it to be used for evergreen content research, rather than for trending topics.
Pinterest has the data and releases it every month on its Business Insights Page.
Trending Tumblr
Tumblr is hard to explain. Many have called it the “new Front Page of the Internet “…” even though Verizon is slowly removing it.
This is more like Reddit and Pinterest combined. Users can create a Tumblr account and “reblog” other users’ posts
It is responsible for many social trends, including the controversial gold dress/blue dress controversy of 2014. This topic is not something marketers discuss often, like Reddit.
Tumblr’s Trending Page lists trending posts as well as tag searches. This page was discovered only recently. You can search Tumblr by tags or media types.
You can be a niche expert by taking the time to search for relevant tags.
Tumblr is a noisy network but can still be very useful.
Wikipedia Trends
Which website has the highest popularity for almost all things? Wikipedia!
Wikipedia is an excellent resource for information about many current-to-trend subjects.
If longsword combat is on a rise, Wikipedia pages about longswords and medieval warfare will also be popular
Where can you find this information? Source: Wikipedia. All statistics and information are publicly available on Wikipedia. In its default format, it’s not difficult to understand.
CSV files can also be downloaded, but not raw data. This tool presents well-organized information.
Google Trends
Google Trends is the most well-known tool for researching trends. Journalists and companies use it frequently to stay on top of the latest topics.
While it is easy to use, there are some gems that you can use to get more out of it.
Google Trends Autosuggest
Most people are familiar with Google Search Engine autocomplete. However, Google Trends has a similar feature.
Google will give the best guess at categories if your keywords are typed. This will give you more data to explore.
Google’s long-tail search traffic is so great that you’ll often get more data (and better-related trends) if you use Google’s suggested category instead of your keywords.
Google Trends Explore
If you don’t know what your target keyword is, you can search for niches. Google Trends Exploration is a good place to start.
Scroll down to hyper-specific categories using the navigation menu. You can also filter by country, time range, or search type.
You can also do even more…
Google Hot trends Feed and Alerts
Google Trends allows you to subscribe via RSS feed or email to popular topics. You can opt to receive email alerts or your RSS feed about any topic rising.
But, wait! There’s more.
Google Trends provides a general Hot Trends webpage that can be used both for Google Search and YouTube.
Google Trends also provides Top charts, which can be sorted according to category.
Both pages provide RSS feeds and subscriptions to alerts. This can be a big help if you have websites of general interest.
Searches and Topics
The rising searches are my favorite part of Google Trends. Scroll to the bottom of any page to find a keyword or topic information.
Click on the Rising button. Click the Rising button.
You have the option to continue down the rabbit hole but you’ll find hidden gems.
Productivity tip – Don’t forget about alerts and embedded options The embed option can be placed as a custom widget on your WordPress Dashboard or CMS Backend.
Google News
Google News may seem redundant after Google Trends, but there is a critical difference. Google News curates headlines manually curated.
It is slightly lower in the list of trending topics, but it has less noise. Here are two more tips.
Create custom and pre-customized sections. Make a news section on trending topics.
Second, use alerts and feeds.
Ahrefs // SEMrush // BuzzSumo
A paid tool package can include Trending tools from BuzzSumo Ahrefs, Semrush, or BuzzSumo.
BuzzSumo tends more social-first than Ahrefs but both offer interesting trending toolsets very similar to Ruzzit.
BuzzSumo lets you sort by topic or time.
Every tool is so diverse that it deserves its post.
Next steps
We mentioned in our article about the best SEO tools that there are too many data points to make blind decisions.
You can’t just paint with numbers and expect to go viral. It does mean that you can create better content by using more data.
Research is about combining data points from different sources. You can take trending subreddits and pair them with Google Trends.
These tools are free.
