Top of Today’s Trending topics with these 15 free Online Tools
Whether
you’re trying to find the latest trending content as part of your job, or
simply trying to stay relevant, the Internet can sometimes be an almost
too-expansive world; with so many different websites and social networks out
there, it can get a little confusing as to what to use when trying to pin down
the latest viral trends. For those of us who are content creators,
social media specialists, or community managers, staying on top of today’s
trending content is essential to our survival: we need to have a firm
knowledge on what’s relevant in our society, in order to ensure that we can
contribute something to those conversations. Realizing this need, we’ve
compiled 16 different online tools and resources that you can use to help you
remain aware of the latest trending topics.
The
following list was inspired by the recently were listed for finding relevant
content on trending topics. We took some of those things, added a few of our own,
and created the list of 16 below. One or two of the tools are focused more on
helping content creators come up with relevant, trending content, but still
fits in with the overall theme of trying to stay current with trends.
One
of the most undervalued yet best tools for tracking trending content and topics
across the Internet, Google Trends looks at the trends in Google searches
around the world. Considering that most people use Google for Internet search,
Trends provides a pretty accurate gauge on what is or isn’t hot right now. What
makes Trends so great, though, is its visualizer, which shows you a visual
display on how any particular search term has done over time. For example,
looking at “Kim Kardashian butt”, we see from the visualizer that there was a
huge spike in Google searches for that key phrase in November (around the time
when Paper Magazine released those now-infamous pictures).
So,
many us may not be active users of Google’s social network, but Google+
actually provides its own version of presenting trending topics. The page
offers you different ways to explore trending content or relevant communities.
You can look at what hashtags are trending (including searching for any that
aren’t featured as a trending hashtag) and determine whether there’s been an
increase or decrease in social activity regarding that topic. The page also
features popular posts, interesting people and pages to follow, and even
suggests communities that Google+ believes are relevant to you.
While
Facebook’s little trending sidebar initially served as a major annoyance to
many years when it was first released (and, actually, may still be an annoyance
for users), it’s a highly valuable resource when trying to figure out what the
world is talking about. Taking into consideration Facebook’s position as the
top social network in the world – with more than 1.35 billion active users every month – you got
to believe that it will provide you an accurate count on what topics or content
are trending.
Really
the first social network to get on top of trending topics across the Internet,
Twitter is one of the top resources for discovering trending content online.
Not only can you look at what’s being said around any given hashtag or keyword,
Twitter’s algorithm has drastically improved over time to show you trending
contents that it thinks is most relevant to you or your brand. If you want, yo
can opt to have Twitter stop providing you with these tailored trends and
instead search for trends per certain criteria (including sorted by location).
Hardly
anyone I know uses Quora, which is really a shame. It’s a community of people
who specialize in their specific fields and industries, providing knowledge to
people who want to learn more on anything from woodworking to venture capital.
Quora is a great place to inspiration for the next big trending content piece,
as well as for pinning down what people are actually interested in right now.
As certain topics become popular in offline and online discussions, you’ll see
a similar shift in discussions towards those same topics on Quora. On Quora,
you can subscribe to specific feeds that interest you, as well as follows
certain questions or topics that people post, and stay updated on how the
community responds.
One
of the best places to discover trending content around the Internet. From
articles and memes, to jokes and recent world news, Reddit aggregates trending
content making the Internet rounds. Posts are upvoted or downvoted, which
pushes the most popular content to the top of its front page. Many people
create content around the stuff that they find on Reddit, and many of the
Internet’s most viral memes originated from the site.
What’s
Trending is a website dedicated to showing you…well…what’s trending. The site
shows you content across the Internet that are currently trending, content
that’s trending in real-time, and offers predictions on what they believe is
going to be the next big thing.
Hacker
News is definitely more targeted towards those whose beat is in technology or
startups, but it’s a valuable resource nonetheless. It’s simple layout can seem
to be intimidating at first, since it gives off the persona of being more
technical than it is, but it’s actually really easy to navigate. Hacker News
has an upvote feature in place, allowing user to vote for cool or interesting
content that’s posted to the site. To find what’s most interesting to people,
simply look at the number of upvotes on a post; there’s no way to re-sort it by
number of upvotes (which is a bummer), but it’s still pretty great.
If
you’re trying to find some of the most recent and interesting trending content
making the Internet rounds, then there’s nothing better than checking out
BuzzFeed’s trending posts. Sure, it can sometimes be filled with list articles
replete with GIFs, but nonetheless BuzzFeed’s editorial staff makes sure to
stay on top of trending news items: from things going in Congress, to whether
Kim Kardashian has paid her selfie retoucher, yet. And, I mean, it’s a great
resource to help you come up with other content for your own site or brand.
BuzzSumo
is a great online platform that helps you determine what kind of content has
done well in the past year per whatever specific topic. So, for instance, a
search for “pokemon” will show you results for the most-shared web content in
the past year relevant to the topic of Pokemon. This gives you an idea on
the kind of future content to create. With Pokemon, it seems that online
quizzes tend to fare well, so the logical thing to do would be to create a
similar type of quiz in the future if you want that content to be
highly-shareable. BuzzSumo lets you narrow your search to the content in the
past month, week, or day, to show you the most recent, popular content
surrounding a topic, as well as sort the results per the type of content (e.g.,
article, infographic, video, etc.). They offer premium services, but the free
tool is great on its own.
If
you’ve already got content in mind that you want to write, but just don’t know
what the content will look like, HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator can you give
you some inspiration. By putting in three different nouns (representing the
idea or story you want to pursue), the tool will give you a few examples of the
type of content you could produce. For example, I used “iPhone”, “Doctor Who”,
and “Mindy Lahiri” as three possible topics I want to write about, and HubSpot
suggested a few different articles I could produce.
NewsWhip
is seriously fantastic. The platform tracks millions of stories, pictures, and
videos every day from more than 100,000 different source. Every two minutes,
they check up on changes to how often or how fast certain content is being
shared on the Internet. They have a premium tool, but their News App is
free to use, and still shows you the most relevant content that you should
definitely know about.
Similar
to Hubspot’s Blog Topic Generator, Portent’s Title Maker essentially wants to
help you nail down a title that can make your content go viral. By simply
inserting the topic on which you want to write, it suggests a title and angle
on which you should write, along with a breakdown on the explanations behind
the words it uses or the format of the title. Of course, the goal is really to
focus on the title format rather than the contents of the actual title it gives
you (since they sometimes just don’t make any sense – The Mindy Project and
a filibuster…?)
Another
tool that’s really aimed towards those in the tech or startup beat, Product
Hunt is an amazing resource to keep you on top of what people are talking
about. It works on an upvote system, and unlike Hacker News, products listed on
Product Hunt move up or down per their number of upvotes. Every day, you can
check out what’s trending most on the site, offering you ideas on what to
produce content around. Often, trending things on Product Hunt produce some of
the most viral content on the Internet.
After
linking your brand’s Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts, Swayy analyzes
the type of content your share and the types of communities in which you
engage, and then suggests relevant content for you. You also have the option to
add topics for which you’re interested, and the platform will further suggest
popular online content. Swayy is free for one person in your brand. You can add
additional dashboards for more people, but you’ll have to pay a premium price.
A
simple-to-use social analytics platform, Topsy gives you social media insight
on such things like key influencers, data analytics, and web traffic. Using the
basic features (without having to log-in), you can easily find the latest top
content on the Internet. If you log-in with your Facebook or Twitter account,
you gain those additional features. You’ll also have access to alert settings,
for which Topsy will alert you when there are specific mentions of
your brand, event, name, site, or favorite topic being talked about on Twitter.
Topsy also offers a Google Trends-like visualizer for social mentions on a
particular keyword.
