There are a number of reasons to follow hot trends on Twitter and Instagram. Of course, some of them are for monitoring hot content, or marketing. But it can also be fun on a personal level to get the latest on what people are talking about all over the world.
You might also find it is an interesting place to get the latest news, and to see what people think about current events happening anywhere.
If you want to better monitor trends, Twitter is your best bet. It’s fast, real-time and open. Also, the 140-character limit and the successful adoption of visual content (images, animated GIFs and auto-playing videos), make Twitter feeds highly productive and effective in terms of the amount of the information you can grasp within a short amount of time.
You can start by trying out a couple of useful Twitter monitoring and hashtag analytics tools for the job.
Twitter’s own “Trends” section has been largely improved over the years. You can see what people are talking about on Twitter and, on top of that, which of your friends are engaging with each of the trends.
Trends are localized, so you’ll see some local trends which other people around the world won’t see but you’ll see most of the bigger global trends too.
If you are in a good habit of planning your daily Twitter feed, go to Twitter’s home page each time to see which of the trends you’d like to cover. This is most likely to increase your Twitter visibility big time.
Hashtagify is one of my favorite tools visualizing hashtag relationships and allowing you to understand any trend better.
Besides, its “Popular hashtags” section is a great way to monitor trending hashtags and see how fast they have been gaining popularity. You can also subscribe to email updates to get daily, weekly or monthly updates about the top hashtags. Just to choose your frequency and opt in with your email.
Click straight to “Popular Hashtags” tab to see which hashtags you’d want to use today or this week. Click any hashtag to see its historic trending graph (tweets per hour) to estimate your exposure. You’ll even see which influential Twitter users were using the hashtags and see the recent tweets for some context.
If you happen to know why something is trending, you can contribute a small explanation for others lower on the page.
This is an entire Twitter interface program that lets you follow trends and buzzing topics, while sending through your Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin accounts.
All of the stats are done in real time, which is a nice touch, as most do trending topics over the course of a certain amount of time. What it does is finding popular URLs based on your interests and letting you easily schedule it into your Twitter feed.
While there is limited functionality with this one, the program itself is really cool. It is a large world map that you can scroll, and you can click on regions to find trending topics.
There are a list of keywords currently buzzing at the bottom, which you can click to get a look at the location and then track down the source. It is multi-lingual, easy to use and looks good. So it hits all the buttons for a simple trend tracker, without any other features.
A complete real time browser program, TweetDeck is the most popular Twitter tool on the web. It has plenty of features, and is compatible with Windows and Mac desktops, Android, iPhone and Blackberry.
You can put in the trends or subjects you want to follow and get regular updates, as well as check what the most popular tweets and topics of the moment are.
Twitonomy is a neat Twitter analytics tool allowing you to see your personal profile stats as well as letting you search any hashtag. Its hashtag analytics feature is paid but you can still see most influential Twitter users tweeting the hashtag as well as get some sample historic graphs.
Tagboard uses hashtags to search for and collect public social media within seconds of being posted to networks like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Search a hashtag, then get a visual look at how that hashtag is being used on social media.
Quickly pull user generated content, and your own branded social content, into one place and then decide how you want to use it. It’s a great tool for conference organizers to add some social media context and encourage more social media engagement from participants and speakers.
This is a fantastic way to monitor the most heavily trending tags on the platform. But it is also a means to see what hashtags are being poorly represented. You can corner a keyword by checking out its competition.
Using social media trends is a great way to take advantage of social media proof (if you are wondering what it is, Kristina Trood of ResultsFirst explained it very well here). It’s also a great way to build engagement and following. DirJournal also provides a good list of resources to read on the topic.
If you want to follow social media trends and look at the latest hot topics currently trending, it is easy to do. Any one of the tools above can simplify the process and make it much easier to take a look at what is going on online. Plus, they are mostly free, so you don’t have to worry about going over your app budget to get them.
What are some tools you find useful for navigating social media trends?