Looking for ways to ensure you’re tapping into key opportunities for your brand this upcoming holiday season?
Ensuring that you’re aware of the latest trends in your niche is key to maximizing your potential, and there’s a range of tools that you can use to research and analyze relevant trends and topics, to ensure that you maintain awareness of what’s happening at any given time.
I mean, reading Social Media Today is pretty key in itself, so if you’re not signed up to our free newsletter, you should do that.
But aside from that, here are some platform-specific research options that you can use to get a better understanding of what’s happening in your brand niche.
1. TikTok Trends
TikTok is arguably the best indicator of cultural shifts, especially among younger audiences, and as such, it’s also a valuable tool for learning about key trends in your niche.
TikTok’s trends tool, which provides insights into trending hashtags by industry, is a valuable option for digging into such, and gleaning important notes to help guide your creative thinking.
As you can see in this example, TikTok Trends gives you a listing of key trends in your chosen industry, while you can also dig further into each to learn more about demographic engagement, related topics, example uploads, and more.
In addition to topics, TikTok trends also provides info on trending creators, video styles, and more, giving you a window into what’s resonating in the app at any given time.
A valuable tool to keep in mind.
2. Reddit Pro Trends
Reddit has become a key reference point for a growing number of online shoppers who are seeking real, human insight into products. Indeed, research suggests that 42% of users trust Reddit recommendations more than influencer-sponsored posts or branded advertisements.
In the age of gen AI, actual human reviews are becoming more valuable, and as such, Reddit could be a key tool in providing more insight into what your target audience is seeking, and what you need to be promoting in your ads.
Reddit Pro Trends, which was recently added on mobile, is a key tool on this front.
With Reddit Pro Trends you can monitor mentions of your business, track conversations featuring your target keywords, and discover engagement opportunities in real time.
That could give you a heap of insight into not only want people are looking for, but what specific features they’re interested in, and common questions that you could answer.
Building this into your approach could help to round out your marketing messaging.
3. Pinterest Trends
While it’s less of a social app, and more of a shopping platform these days, Pinterest has become a valuable tool in guiding product discovery, with 80% of weekly Pinterest users noting that they are inspired to shop based on what they find in the app.
And with 578 million users, and growing, Pinterest is becoming a bigger consideration in this respect. Which also makes it a valuable tool for gleaning insight into shopping trends.
Pinterest Trends lets you search for trending Pins based on any keyword, so that you can dig into specific topics and elements that relate to your brand.
That could give you more perspective on shopping-focused queries and questions, which could then help to shape your communications and promotions.
4. Grok
Whether you personally are still using X or not, the platform remains a key connector for real-time discussion, and is still reportedly being used by over 600 million people every month.
Yes, X has its own political and speech concerns, under the guidance of Elon Musk. But as a marketer, you need to be showing up where your audience is active, while the breadth of X discussion could also be relevant to your brand, and helping to build your outreach program.
Grok, xAI’s chatbot tool, which is powered by X posts, could be a valuable guide on this front.
Grok can’t provide up-to-the-minute insights, as it’s not ingesting all X post data in real-time, but it can provide close to live updates on key trends and shifts, on any topic.
So if you already know your key subjects, you can ask Grok what’s trending in relation to those terms on X as well for additional trend insight. Just make sure you word your queries to be X specific, or hone in on specific elements.
It could be a valuable accompaniment to your broader research effort.
5. AI-Powered Ad Tools
This is less about personal research, and more about letting the machines do the research on your behalf.
Every social media platform has now introduced at least some form of AI-powered targeting within its ad system, and these automated targeting options are getting better and better at recognizing usage patterns, and understanding what ad content will be most relevant to each individual user.
Indeed, Meta recently reported that its AI ad tools drove a 6% increase in average conversions in the most recent quarter.
I mean, it makes sense that AI systems would be valuable for this purpose, as AI tools are designed to recognize patterns in large groupings of data, which should mean that they’re able to correlate interests and activity on a far broader scope than anything that’s come before.
What that means for your process, however, is that it might be worth testing out each platform’s AI-enabled ad targeting, and letting the machines choose your ad audience for you, in order to see whether they might be able to find a broader audience that’ll be interested in your products and services.
Meta has Advantage+, TikTok enables AI-creation and targeting via its Symphony platform, Pinterest has Performance+, X ads are now using Grok for targeting, LinkedIn offers Performance Max and Accelerate.
There’s a range of options to consider, and it may be worth trying them out, even in limited form, to see just how far they’ve come, and whether they can drive improved performance for your campaigns.
