Good social media marketing companies understand that keeping up to date with trends is a vital element of running a successful social media strategy. The best social media marketing is responsive and involves identifying a trend, evaluating its significance and relevance to your business and its customers, and quickly generating content that capitalizes on the trend – whether that’s a simple tweet or status update, a blog or opinion piece, or even a video.
Both Facebook and Twitter present trending topics in a handy sidebar, and many businesses – including your competitors – make good use of this information in their social media marketing. But it’s not all about Facebook and Twitter; here are three ideas for other ways to find top trending topics online.
- Google Trends – Google is by far the most used search engine in the US, with a 64% market share. That means it’s perfectly poised to provide up-to-the-minute data and analytics on trending topics. You can easily refine categories to drill down into the data, and graphs, charts, maps and other visualizations make Google Trends extremely easy to use.
- What’s Hot on Google+ – Google+, which launched in 2011, hasn’t turned out to be quite the challenger to Facebook and Twitter it was intended to be. However it still has millions of customers who actively use the site, and they’re loyal, too – Google+ was the top-rated social media site in a recent customer satisfaction survey. The What’s Hot page provides a great snapshot of what topics are trending on the platform.
- Social media analytics tools – To gain the widest possible view of what’s trending across various social media sites, analytics tools such as Hootsuite Insights provide real-time trend data and analytics integrated with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube and others. The versatility and flexibility of such tools in identifying trends and measuring sentiment makes them a must-have for social media marketing companies, as well as for businesses that carry out their social media marketing in-house.