Trying to get traction on your blog or grow your social media following?
If you want to attract new subscribers and improve your search engine rankings, you’ll need to write about the things your audience cares about (you do know who your customers are, right?).
I’m sure you have started building a list of evergreen content that you know your readers want to hear. Are you also sharing and writing your thoughts about what is hot and trending in your industry?
You should be.
When you produce quality content that your audience cares about, people are more likely to listen to what you have to say, follow and buy from you.
Now that we know why writing and sharing trending topics is important, where do we find them?
Here are 6 tools my team uses to find and monitor what’s hot now.
1. Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo is one of the most powerful online tools for finding and planning popular content. With a simple search by topic, keyword, or competitor, Buzzsumo will show you a list of posts ranked by the number of social shares. You can even filter the most shared content by content types such as video or image and blog length.
Unlike most content generating platforms, you can also monitor mentions of your own brand and analyze any domain’s content (yours or a competitor) for actionable stats like if your longer blog posts get shared more or your audience prefers things sweet and to the point.
2. Feedly
Feedly is a great aggregator of online content. You will set up feeds related to your keywords or specific blogs you know you want to read and get some great ideas for that next blog you need to write.
You can sort your results by latest or most popular (or both!), integrate your google keywords and share to your social platforms right from your Feedly account.
With Feedly, you will have a bookmark of content, perfectly sorted when you need some content inspiration.
3. Google Alerts
If you know the keywords you want to focus your writing on, go ahead and set up some free Google Alerts. Google Alerts let you monitor keywords and sends reports right to your inbox. You can choose to receive reports after every mention, or once a day, etc.
We also like to use Google Alerts to monitor and manage brand mentions for clients. If you are feeling a little stumped, don’t worry, Google will give you some great suggestions to get your juices flowing.
4. Google Trends
Another popular (and free) Google product, Google Trends will give you real-time stats on the topics your audience cares about. Can’t decide if you want to write about sales or an upcoming event?
Be sure to also check out how your brand is doing. We monitor this every month on Google Trends.
Writing a blog post about Black Friday? Look how easy it is to see what was trending within the Black Friday topic last year (apparently, I need to get a weighted blanket!)
A tool like this can help you generate subject lines too. There are so many ways to use these online tools, you just have to be creative.
5. TrendsMap
Do you want to know what people are talking about around the world?
Maybe knowing the location of a trending topic will help you target your Facebook Ads (save money and attract more interested buyers)? Then TrendsMap is a great little tool that helps you visualize trending hashtags and topics around the world.
6. What’s Trending
What’s Trending may be our last mention but it’s certainly not least.
If you are looking for trending and even viral posts to share on social media, look no further than What’s Trending. Let’s say you are a dog groomer and your audience really responds to videos and pictures of dogs doing funny or cute things. Simply search “#dogs” and you are given plenty of articles that your audience just might like and share.
Even better, What’s Trending will give you more tag suggestions to send you on a deep-dive for the best content and will show you the viral posts first.
What are your favorite ways to find trending topics?
