In the world of social marketing, an organization’s ability to tag on to the right social media trends can often guide a social media campaign’s success and failure.
By keeping your finger on the pulse and participating in trends with timely, relevant, and high-quality content, you can instantly boost engagement with your campaigns and establish your brand as a source of insightful takes on emerging news stories.
A new trend can emerge at any time from countless sources, so it’s crucial to be equipped with tools that will help you react quickly when a relevant trend starts gaining traction.
In this post, we’ll look at how to keep up with social media trends using our six effective tools.
1. Highperformr
When you hear “social media trends”, the first thing that jumps to mind is probably hot news stories, disruptive technologies, and other things that are likely to affect your whole industry.
However, when you’re looking into how to keep up with social media trends, it’s important not only to consider trending topics, but also the engagement patterns that are exclusive to your niche and audience.
The Highperformr analytics suite comes with a variety of features that can help you identify social media trends within your audience and define patterns that will inform your future campaigns.
Using our comprehensive analytics tool, you’ll be able to pick up on trends such as:
- Changes in brand sentiment via the social listening platform.
- Kinds of content formats (images, text, video, links) that have been receiving the most engagement from your audience.
- The popularity of different media types across the social media platforms you’re using.
- Profile-specific engagement reports, showing the behavioral trends of social media users who align with your ideal buyer personas.
- Growth funnel engagement trends, highlighted by our intuitive AI assistant.
By putting together these insights and information about trending topics, you can create content that can drive a higher rate of engagement.
2. Google Trends
If you’re looking for a free, intuitive tool that makes use of fresh data, then Google Trends is definitely one to add to the list.
Google Trends uses search activity to show the level of online interest in a given topic, allowing you to filter by time frame to see the interest in a specific period, or restrict your analytics to a certain geographic area.
As a free tool, Google Trends won’t give you the same level of detail as some of the other software on this list. However, if you want to zoom out and see a more comprehensive view of a trend outside a social media platform, this tool is a great one to check out.
3. AlsoAsked
AlsoAsked is a user-friendly search monitoring tool that allows you to enter keywords from a trending topic, then shows you the closest related questions for that search query. If, for example, you enter the term “HR tool”, AlsoAsked might come back with popular queries such as “what is an HR tool kit?” or “what are the 7 major HR activities”.
Though AlsoAsked is generally thought of as an SEO tool, it has some great applications for leveraging social media trends in your campaigns.
If, for example, a news story from your industry is generating a lot of buzz, but social media platforms are already being dominated by some of your close competitors, you can use the platform to find different popular angles on the same topic, and gain a better share of voice for your brand. This approach can also be useful if you’ve been late to notice a specific trend, and want to differentiate your content from the posts that are already out there.
4. Sprout Social
Though Sprout Social’s core features are more focused on social media analytics and scheduling, it does offer some robust monitoring features to help you keep up with the most popular trends on your social media platforms.
Its “Trend Reports” view gives you insights on X/Twitter performance highlighting your most successful tweets, and provides an intuitive breakdown of the most popular hashtags, topics, and public profiles.
With pricing starting at $199 per user, per month, Sprout Social may not be the most accessible solution when you’re looking at how to keep up with social media trend
5. Talkwalker
If your brand has a broad target audience that allows you to get involved with a variety of different trending topics, then Talkwalker is definitely a tool to consider for your social media tech stack.
This platform draws on trends from 150 million data sources, including popular social media platforms, forums, video sharing platforms, and news sites, all of which you can control with more than 50 filter options. With such a far-reaching data pool, this platform is one of the best monitoring solutions for brands that need to be aware of trends before they’re even considered news.
The sheer variety of datasets and views available through Talkwalker might make a lot of marketers feel overwhelmed at first. However, if you’re able to tackle its steep learning curve, there’s masses of potential to unlock for any social media campaign that focuses on rapid, short-lived news cycles.
6. Mentionlytics
Mentionlytics provides a range of features for monitoring keywords, brand mentions, and sentiment in real-time, making it easy to keep up with emerging trends and use its data to inform your social media content.
Aside from giving you filtering options to focus on all the major social media platforms, Mentionlytics is also capable of tracking content published on other channels, such as blogs and news sites. This makes it a particularly attractive choice for B2B brands that are gaining traction in their industry, and need to keep up with mentions and trends in niche online journals just as much as on social media.
Mentionlytics is a proudly global tool, and is able to track detailed emotional sentiment in a range of different languages. Because a large part of its value proposition focuses on this international reach, it may not be an ideal choice for smaller, more localized brands focusing on one geographic region.
However, if you’re catering to a global audience, or you have plans to expand into other countries soon, Mentionlytics could be a great way to keep up with trends anywhere in the world.
How to Keep Up With Social Media Trends? Find Great Tech!
Things move fast on social media, and keeping your finger on the pulse can be difficult at the best of times. We hope this round-up of tools has made it easier to strategize your social media tech stack, and helped you find the right solution for monitoring trends in your industry.
For more support with understanding audience sentiment and highlighting campaign trends with powerful AI features, sign up to Highperformr for free today!
