Small Business Marketing: Taking Advantage of Trending Topics

Small business marketers tend to go with the flow. When it comes to social media, they tend to post informational updates here and there, mostly about their own business. And that’s fine. But it gets boring, and often lacks imagination, and does nothing to really draw people in or expand your audience and reach. Not to mention it’s often done outside of any real strategy.

One place to check for content and information that might resonate with your audience would be the trending topics online. Actually, it’s more than one place; there are quite a few platform specific sites and features that will tell you what people are talking about, or interested in, online. By knowing this information, you can discover what’s hot at the moment, and perhaps carry that information to your audience to see if you can get them more engaged.

Additionally, if you have something new or interesting to share related to that topic, you can become a part of the larger conversation about that topic and perhaps get discovered by new audiences.

Here are a few of the places where you fan find trending topic information that could be useful:

Facebook Trending

This is a relatively new feature of Facebook, and as such, it is not yet available to everyone. It is still in the early stages of rollout. Also, right now it’s just one list that shows what is being talked about on Facebook worldwide. Hopefully they will add filters to allow for more localized or regional searches. Take a look in the right hand column of your newsfeed, and you may see the “Trending” column. There you get a list of clickable links that tells you what people are talking about on Facebook.

I’m not sure what level of time frame they include in these trends, but it takes the topics a little while to change, so I’m gathering it might be at least a 24-hour composite, rather than more immediate. But there are some great ideas in there that might work well for the type of material you could share or piggy-back on in order to get noticed.

Twitter Trends

Twitter has been showing it’s trending topics for some time now, and it’s generally a mix of popular words, phrases, or hashtags that are being tweeted at that moment. You can set it to see what’s trending across the U.S. or some other country, or you can choose a city nearest to you. While Lancaster is not one of the option, I could choose nearby cities like Harrisburg, Philadelphia, or Baltimore. Play around and see how these various cities are similar to, or differ from, one another and the country as a whole.

You can also find Twitter trends elsewhere on the Internet. One of my favorites is the interactive trending map at Trendsmaps .

There’s also What the Trend from Hootsuite, and Trending on Twitter from Hashtags.org (in and of itself a very useful tool).

Google + Trending

On Google+, click on the “Explore” tab, and scroll down. At the top you’ll see something called “Hot Topics.” These are generally rather generic topics in hashtag form. But if you scroll down further, you’ll see a box labeled, “Trending.” The beauty of this box is not only will you see the most popular topics on Google +, but you’ll also see whether they are increasing, decreasing, or staying even in terms of popularity.

Google Trends

Not to be confused with Google+, Google Trends is a look at what people are using the search engine to search for, and it’s also one of my favorite tools. When you go to Google Trends, you’ll see a column on the left called “Trending Now.”

The colored box at the bottom shifts and changes through color coded trends, making it a bit more visual.

Certainly these aren’t the only sources of trending information. Almost every search engine or major news source has some sort of trending feature that you can use to find out what people are talking about.

So What’s Trending?

The key to trending topics is to first understand WHY a topic is trending. Generally a click on the topic will tell you why. When I saw that Maximillian Schell was trending, I clicked and discovered he had died, and when I saw that Jeremy Irons was trending, I discovered that he would be playing Lex Luthor in the new Superman movie. And of course things like the Superbowl and Groundhog Day were popular trending topics this past weekend.

Also, understand that while some topics will trend across all platforms (the Super Bowl is a good example), some trending topics might be specific to certain platforms and certain areas. It’s just the nature of the beast. Understand where your audience is. If a topic is trending on Twitter, but not other platforms, your best bet is to jump in on Twitter, though you might be able to get traction elsewhere.

The easiest way to participate and become a part of a trending topic is to simply share an article about something that is trending, but would also be of interest to your audience. But, be careful if you try to capitalize or jump on a trend. Make sure your use of that trend (or accompanying hashtag) is appropriate. Newsjacking, as this is known, has some legitimate and safe uses, but you need to be careful if you jump on something of a sensitive nature. Also, trying to catch the wave of a trend can also backfire if it looks spammy, inappropriate, or out of context. It has to be done right, and done smartly.

And trending topics are just that: trending. That means that they can change rather quickly, often predictably, but at other times, without rhyme or reason.

If you want to get more local with your trending topics, you might want to check locally filtered lists on either Facebook or Twitter, and take some time perusing that newsfeed. On Twitter, I keep a column/list of just local folks, and on Facebook, that is most likely done for you. You can most likely find a feed/list with the name of your town or city over in the left side column of your newsfeed.

What are some ways you have used trending topics, or have seen others use them. Have you seen both good and bad uses?

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