Consumer preferences change on a whim. For businesses and investors, accurately predicting these trends can be the difference between success and failure.
It’s no wonder today’s top trend tracking tools put a heavy emphasis on data from search and social media: One study found that 86% of consumers consider search engines the most effective way to find solutions to their problems, while a significant 29% of Gen Z and Millennial consumers prefer using social media for their research.
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In addition, the global e-commerce market is forecasted to reach $6.4 trillion this year, with a 10.1% annual growth rate. Unsurprisingly, many of these online shoppers are beginning and ending their customer journey on search or social media, providing detailed insights into their thought process at each stage of the marketing funnel.
In this post, we’ll show you 10 tools for tapping into this goldmine of search and social data to uncover emerging trends before they become mainstream. Whether you’re a marketer, PR professional, founder, or investor, these tools can help you level up your strategy and master your niche.
What are the best trend tracking tools?
So here they are – our picks for the top trend tracking tools for marketers and PR pros:
1. Exploding Topics
Exploding Topics is a trend tracking platform that helps companies identify major emerging trends months or years before they take off.
Cofounded by Brian Dean of popular SEO blog Backlinko, the platform algorithmically analyzes millions of searches, mentions, and conversations across the web to identify promising products and industries. You can use it to find fast-growing startups, so-called blue ocean markets, and trends that are showing signs of long-term growth.
The platform’s searchable trends database contains over 779,000 trends and is updated daily. You can track and analyze specific trends at the country level and get instant trend alerts, giving you a massive competitive edge.
Pricing
Exploding Topic’s pricing plans are as follows:
- Entrepreneur: $39 per month billed annually
- Investor: $99 per month billed annually
- Business: $249 per month billed annually
2. Determ
Determ is a media monitoring and social listening platform that tracks over 100 million online sources, including webpages, news sites, blogs, forums, and social media platforms. You can request the team at Determ to add any online source you like at no extra cost – though chances are it’s already in the database.
Determ can help you analyze industry trends in a few ways:
- Brand monitoring. View all your mentions in one streaming feed. Get real-time alerts when you or a topic you’re tracking starts spiking in popularity, and understand what caused it with instant summaries and analysis of trending posts. You can receive your alerts via email, mobile push notifications, or Slack.
- Campaign and hashtag tracking. Get real-time feedback on how particular hashtags or campaigns are performing across multiple platforms, and monitor the reach and engagement of your campaign.
- Sentiment analysis. Find out if the conversations surrounding your brand or a particular hashtag or campaign are positive or negative. Track how your customer’s perception of you changes over time or compares to your competitors.
- Competitor analysis. Keep track of your competitors’ social media and digital PR activities in one feed and see how their customers are responding. Measure your share of voice and learn whether your target audience favors you or your competitors.
With all this data to inform your marketing strategy, you can adapt on a dime and focus your efforts on what’s proven to work.
Pricing
Available on request.
3. SparkToro
SparkToro is an audience research platform and trend tracker cofounded by Rand Fishkin, former CEO of Moz. It can help you create newsjacking campaigns and viral content by showing you the topics your audience are engaging with most in real time.
You’ll also get data on trending hashtags, giving your social media posts even more viral potential.
The tool works by tapping into a massive database of web and social network data to show you where your prospective customers hang out online, plus the brands, influencers, publications, and podcasts they follow. You’ll get detailed audience demographic data and insights into the words, phrases, and hashtags your target market uses.
Compared to tools like Google Analytics, SparkToro can give you deeper insights into the psychographics and behaviors of your audience. This data can be used to create customer segments for hyper-personalized marketing campaigns across channels like your website and email in addition to social media.
Besides trend tracking and audience research, SparkToro can help you discover content gaps and promising digital PR opportunities, improve social ad targeting, and identify influencer partnerships.
Pricing
SparkToro’s free plan gives you 20 audience lookups per month. Paid plans are as follows:
- Personal: $38 per month billed annually
- Business: $112 per month billed annually
- Agency: $225 per month billed annually
4. Glimpse
Glimpse is a market research and trend tracking tool for PR professionals, SEOs, investors, and e-commerce brands.
Billed as the world’s largest trends platform, it amasses data from across the web to help companies detect blossoming trends before they take off. For instance, you can use Glimpse to find profitable niches for Amazon and Shopify, or discover business ideas with high profit potential.
The platform’s database of over 1 million trends is filterable by growth, volume, brand, and country. It also breaks trending topics down by social channel. You can search the database by keyword to see the year-over-year or month-over-month growth trajectory for your chosen trend, plus get forecasting data.
If you’re a content marketer, you can use Glimpse to discover topics that appear to have zero search volume but that are actually starting to trend. You can also connect your Search Console and get real-time alerts on keywords that are starting to trend that you’re already getting search traffic for.
Glimpse will also send you reports on top exponential and hypergrowth trends, plus real-time email alerts for the trends that are most relevant to you.
Glimpse’s Chrome extension, Google Trends Supercharged, adds enriched data and insights to the default Google Trends experience. With the tool installed, you can view Google Trends absolute search volume and metrics like keyword difficulty, CPC, and competition data, plus a comprehensive list of People Also Search keywords.
Pricing
Glimpse’s free plan gives you 10 lookups per month. Paid plans include:
- Pro: $40 per month billed annually
- Expert: $199 per month billed annually
5. Mangools KWFinder
KWFinder, part of the Mangools SEO suite, is a keyword research tool for discovering low-competition, high-search-volume, and profitable keywords.
Unlike some other keyword research tools, KWFinder shows you a graph of historical search volume for the last 12 months. This makes it the perfect SEO tool for identifying long-term trends and seasonal content creation opportunities.
When you enter a seed keyword into the tool, you’ll get suggested related keywords plus metrics like search volume, CPC, and keyword difficulty. You can filter keywords by language and location – right through the country, district, and city levels.
Plus, if you enter a competitor’s domain into the tool, KWFinder will show you their best keywords.
Overall, KWFinder is one of the top trend tracking tools for content creators, marketers, and SEO professionals.
Pricing
KWFinder’s free plan gives you five keyword lookups per 24 hours, with 15 related keywords and competitor keywords per lookup. Premium plans include:
- Entry: $19.90 per month billed annually
- Basic: $29.90 per month billed annually
- Premium: $44.90 per month billed annually
- Agency: $89.90 per month billed annually
6. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a widely used content discovery and social media analytics platform that identifies trending topics and tracks content performance across multiple social channels. You can use it to find the most popular content by shares or engagement based on a target keyword, and filter it by date, content type, language, and country.
The tool can send you real-time alerts about trending content based on your chosen keywords, brands, or topics. These insights can be used to plan social media content that your audience will be more likely to share and engage with.
Apart from tracking trends, BuzzSumo is a fantastic tool for identifying link-worthy topics and discovering relevant influencers to partner with your brand. It also has a set of competitor analysis features that let you find your competitors’ top-shared content and compare it against your own.
Pricing
BuzzSumo’s pricing plans include:
- Content Creation: $159 per month billed annually
- PR & Comms: $239 per month billed annually
- Suite: $399 per month billed annually
- Enterprise: $999 per month billed annually
What are the best free tools for trend analysis?
The following free trend tracking tools are additional useful sources of search and social data:
1. Detailed
Detailed, formerly known as the popular marketing blog Viperchill, is a website that tracks the rankings of over 3000 mega digital brands like The Spruce, Cnet, WebMD, and Mashable. Coined “the Bloomberg of SEO,” the company was founded by SEO expert Glen Allsopp.
Detailed publishes in-depth insights about the latest Google algorithm updates and how they impact big digital media brands as well as smaller independent publishers.
The company summarizes their research into reports detailing what the most successful digital brands and media sites are doing with their content and SEO. They also uncover the most profitable niches with low search competition.
The company’s list of the 50 most popular blogs in the world is updated every 24 hours.
Google is a notoriously tough nut to crack, and Detailed gives media professionals, content marketers, and investors an invaluable glimpse into the biggest trends shaping organic search.
2. Pinterest Trends
Pinterest Trends is a free tool for analyzing trending topics on Pinterest based on user searches and pin engagements. It’s especially useful for spotting online shopping and e-commerce trends.
You don’t need an account to view Pinterest’s top trends by region, but if you do have one, you can access advanced filtering options like trend type, keywords, and audience demographics.
3. Twitter Trending
Twitter Trending displays the most popular topics and hashtags on the Twitter (X) platform in real time. You can access it by visiting the Explore page and clicking on the Trending tab. Using the Settings icon to the right of the Search field, you can configure the tool to display global trends or only those in a specific region, such as local results.
Read 5 Tips on How to Follow Hashtags on Twitter
Note that you may be required to log into your Twitter account before you can view this feature.
4. Google Trends
Google Trends has been the go-to free trend analysis tool for marketers and investors since 2012. It displays a graph of changes in Google search volume over time. Optionally, you can use it to compare the search volume of two different terms.
Google Trends results are filterable by country, time range, category, and search vertical (Google Web, News, Images, Shopping, and YouTube).
Is Google Trends accurate?
Google Trends is a helpful trend discovery tool for understanding how a topic’s search volume trajectory evolves over time. However, it’s important to note that Google Trends only shows imprecise search volume data. To get more accurate data, you’ll need to splurge for a premium keyword tool.
Wrapping up
With so much consumer data at our fingertips today, there’s no excuse to take the publish-and-pray approach to marketing. While your competitors rely on fickle speculation to make marketing and product decisions, you can get a headstart on tomorrow’s major trends by putting these trend analysis tools to work for you today.
Author bio: Chloe Brittain is a freelance writer and the founder of Monday Roadmap, a blog for content creators navigating the new landscape of GenAI tools.
