Five ways to find top trending content

Why is it so important to stay on top of trending content? Simple – it gives you the upper hand when you’re trying to get people’s attention.

People are more likely to be engaged with your content and regularly follow you if you’re relevant, partaking in popular trends, talking their language and sharing content that they care about. This is particularly important when we realise that people have short attention spans and viral trends can be over almost as fast as they start, so time is of the essence.

Harnessing what’s trending is a powerful way to ramp up your digital marketing strategy so here are five ways that you can find trending content and never miss an opportunity.

BuzzFeed
BuzzFeed provides a great window into popular culture, spanning social news, entertainment and everything in between. While it may not be for everyone, there’s no denying that it offers a pulse into what’s hot and what’s not. The fact that they have a ‘Trending’ page means you can identify, at a glance, what’s currently popular on social media.

Reddit
Reddit offers pretty much anything for anyone and is known for having very active users who don’t shy away from having heated debates on pretty much any topic under the sun. Often referred to as the “front page of the internet”, it offers a world of inspiration for your latest content.

Reddit too has its own version of trending topics, and you can dig deeper by going into communities that are of interest, or even check what is trending at that exact moment. It offers a great snapshot of what’s popular in real-time.

Twitter
An oldie but a goodie, Twitter remains one of the top five ways to not only break news but also to find out what’s trending. The use of hashtags makes it incredibly easy to figure out what people
are talking about. Whether it’s political, social or cultural, there will be a twitter handle for it.

Moreover, Twitter’s trending topics are based mainly on its algorithm, which figures out what is popular and shares it. If you’re facing a writer’s block, you can always turn to Twitter’s trending topics for some inspiration.

Google Trends
Google Trends is the holy grail of monitoring trends in Google searches. It’s a fast way to see the popularity of a keyword, relative to overall search volume. The great thing is that it lists all the popular stories online, in real-time. You can also explore different genres of topics or browse what the world is reading.

Keyhole
Many people may not know about Keyhole, but it’s a useful tool for finding trending content, because it allows you to track hashtags on social  media, including Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Relatively simple to use, it’s very similar to Google alerts, except that it allows you to monitor social media for key words.

The important thing is that you can set an alert for a certain topic or keyword and monitor it in real-time.

Zaib Shadani is a PR consultant and digital marketing strategist at Shadani Consulting