Member Avatar for InsightsDigital

Have you used Google Trends to access keyword trends? I have used it and it was interesting to see the results for Michael Jackson on the day and time shortly after his death. The results correlate with news reports that Google and Twitter encountered slow connection due to excessive traffic.

Since user generated content is so prevalent and is a part of social media, it is good to monitor what users are conversing about.

I also found another trend service called Trendrr which I was impressed with. For small business owners, free or economically priced add on services are desired.

So how do you monitor social media trends?

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Dani AI

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Monitoring social media trends is most effective when two approaches are used together: broad-signal detection (large-scale spikes and news-driven interest) and focused listening inside specialist communities. The thread already demonstrates that pattern — saw public spikes, pointed out that vertical markets follow industry cues, recommended alerting, and described microblog feeds being reused for product signals. The short plan below turns those observations into a repeatable process.

  1. Define the objective — early warning, brand reputation, product feedback, or content idea generation.
  2. Choose sources by objective — mainstream search/news streams for mass trends; microblogging and social streams for real-time chatter; forums, review sites and trade channels for specialist signals.
  3. Collect continuously via APIs/webhooks/RSS or permitted scraping; capture timestamps and source metadata and store in a searchable index for time-series queries.
  4. Filter and normalize: build boolean queries, include synonyms/jargon, apply language and geo filters, and remove obvious noise and homonyms. Calibrate queries with manual sampling.
  5. Analyze: volume over time, co-occurrence of keywords, simple sentiment scoring plus manual checks, and basic network checks to find amplifiers. Flag statistical anomalies rather than single mentions.
  6. Act and document: triage spikes (origin, sentiment, amplifiers), route to comms/product teams, record outcome and update queries.

Practical tips: specialist niches need lower-volume thresholds, jargon-aware queries and monitoring of closed/professional channels; consumer brands benefit from cross-channel spike detection and engagement metrics. Always validate automated sentiment with human review, document query logic and retention policy, respect platform terms of service, and schedule periodic review of queries and thresholds. A compact triage runbook (find earliest mentions → measure sentiment shift → identify top amplifiers → decide response → log results) keeps monitoring actionable rather than noisy.

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Member Avatar for MktgRob

I use google trends but to be honest the markets that my big clients are targeting are so specific they do not require a whole lot of analysis to see where they are looking. The markets they target tend to take their cues on where to look and what social media to access and use from industry pubs.

Member Avatar for InsightsDigital

I also noticed the same issue with very specialized niches, lest say a medical specialty. Google Trends may me more useful for consumer brands.

Member Avatar for bobchrist

You can also use Google alerts which will let you tracks the web for the topics you're interested in.

Member Avatar for InsightsDigital

I like Google Alerts. A friend of mine uses Techgrigy to monitor social media alerts. There is a free version available but I never got into it.

Member Avatar for Sean Percy

I really like Google alerts. I am trying to get my head around social shopping as a concept (I am not convinced about the model) although I noticed recently that one of the sites I follow is using the twitter api pulling out small product tweets and putting them on the site and associated with the products - thereby hopping to add to the knowledge/opinion relating to product entries/reviews.

It is not an exact science though - some work well - if the tweet references a brand and product name - others work less well are feature common keywords but the tweets are obviously not about a product - still its a sign of how central twitter will be in the future if they continue in ther current form

Member Avatar for InsightsDigital

Twitter search is also a food way to monitor trends. It also helps assess sentiments from a manual qualitative perspective.

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