4 Tools For TikTok Trend Research

If you want to make your TikTok account reach more viewers (and lead to more sales), then you need a good TikTok trend research tool.

Why Are TikTok Trends Useful For Marketing?

When you first open TikTok, you’re presented with a scrolling feed of vertical videos called the For You Page. While you can visit specific creators’ profiles, this feed isn’t a list of people you follow. It’s algorithmically curated based around your interests.

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This means that it’s possible to see content from nearly any creator in your feed … as long as what they’re posting is aligned with the topics that TikTok’s identified your interest in.

As a result, brands don’t need to struggle to generate a large following on TikTok. They simply need to:

1. Have a deep understanding of their audience
2. Create content to target specific trends and topics that said audience is interested in

For example, I‘m interested in books, data privacy, paddleboarding, and needlepoint. Those interests seem pretty different at first glance. But if a company wants to promote needlepoint kits as a way to get offline and live a more analog, private life, then they could target me rather easily using my list of interests.

Specific dances, hashtag challenges, and audio clips can trend on TikTok as well. Brands can potentially leverage viral moments in pop culture and trending sounds to reach more users on TikTok, too.

How to Use TikTok Trends

In order to leverage TikTok trends effectively, it’s important to:

1. Understand your target audience demographics. You need to know your customers are actually using TikTok, and have a clear idea of what common interests, problems, and needs they tend to share as a group. If your target audience isn’t on TikTok, you can still create marketing content in a vertical video format — but you may need to post them on Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts instead.
2. Have a defined brand voice. This will allow you to identify which trending topics, popular hashtags, dances, and sounds actually align with your brand. Creating content that is out of character for your brand can backfire and have an alienating effect — or attract the wrong viewers through poor audience targeting.
3. Engage in social listening. Effectively leveraging a trend entails creating content at the start of a trend cycle, not as popularity is starting to wane. Using a trend tracking tool will be extremely helpful in this regard.
4. Focus on user generated content (UGC) or UGC-style videos. According to marketing firm Single Grain, UGC on TikTok is perceived as 2.4 times more authentic than clearly branded content. Single Grain also reports that micro-influencers — accounts that have between 1,000 and 100,000 social media followers — create content that gets a higher engagement rate than celebrity brand partnership content on TikTok.

How to Find Niche TikTok Trends

If you scroll through your own For You Page, you’ll naturally encounter different trends in the wild. By this time, though, you may be too late to effectively leverage trending hashtags and audio clips. The trick to using TikTok Trends for marketing is to hop on a trend early.

To do that, you’ll need to use one or more of the following resources.

TikTok Creative Center

The TikTok Creative Center shows you insights directly from the platform, including what trends are popular and which brands' ads are performing well. You can also get tips for using different creative assets on TikTok and view the platform's trend projections for this year.

Third-Party TikTok Analytics Tools

Third-party TikTok analytics tools like Social Insider let you view your TikTok account performance, followers, and other data points in new ways. You can then combine these insights with additional information about trends and popular topics.

Trend Spotting Tools

Trend spotting platforms like Exploding Topics give you in-depth insights around what people are interested in across multiple platforms, including TikTok. These tools are particularly useful if your marketing strategy requires creating content that will be popular across more than one platform — but TikTok-only creators get a lot of value out of looking at broader trend patterns, too.

4 Tools to Find TikTok Trends

	Best For	Key Features
Exploding Topics	TikTok trend discovery across all industries	Trend forecasts, multi-platform trend insights, e-commerce trend data, TikTok trend reports
Virlo.ai	Multi-platform short video marketing strategy	TikTok and YouTube Shorts data for cross-platform marketing, machine learning tools, trend data by niche
Pentos	Long-term TikTok trend and data tracking	Data export tools, competitor trend insights
RivalIQ	Improving TikTok content engagement rates	Competitor comparison tools, audience sentiment analysis data, social listening tools

1. Exploding Topics: Best for TikTok Trend Discovery in Any Industry

The Exploding Topics trend database is the best way to discover what's about to trend on TikTok — in any industry.

Rather than showing you only what's already trended on TikTok, Exploding Topics lets you see:

• Historical trend patterns including seasonal spikes
• Interest across TikTok and other channels
• Popular trending products from TikTok Shop (when available)
• Related and connected trends

There are several ways to explore this data, too. You can:

• Browse trends by industry
• Search specific trends
• Review TikTok Shop data
• Explore meta trends
• Read trend reports

I recommend starting off by browsing all of the trends in your industry. Be sure to turn on the one-year trend forecast timeframe so you can see how topics and products of interest are expected to perform in the near future.

You can start using Exploding Topics for free. To get access to the full trend database and other features (like trend forecasts), you'll need a paid Exploding Topics Pro plan.

2. Virlo: Best for Multi-Platform Short Form Video Marketers

Virlo is worth a closer look if you're serious about not only leveraging trends but making sure that your related short-form videos are the absolute best they can be, too.

The platform pulls together data from countless short-form videos across TikTok and other platforms, then helps you:

• Find viral topics to target
• Separate short viral content trends from longer, more persistent spikes in interest
• Research trends by niche
• Turn trends into video scripts and other assets with the help of generative AI

Virlo's AI tools and granular post optimization data — including recommendations for the best time to post your content on TikTok — can help you make the most out of any trend, whether you identified it through Virlo, the TikTok Creative Center, or another app like Exploding Topics.

Virlo is a paid tool; plans start at $243.60 per year for one TikTok account.

3. Pentos: Best for Long-Term TikTok Trend and Data Tracking

Pentos is a TikTok analysis tool that lets you go deeper into your data than when using TikTok's native analytics.

You can see data about your account that stretches beyond 60 days, export it into a spreadsheet for easy reporting, and even compare your account to key competitors.

Pentos also allows you to view data about the popularity of specific topics, trending content, and song clips on TikTok. With all of this information in one place, you can easily:

• Check your account performance
• Identify which of your competitors is outperforming you
• Find out which trends they're leveraging
• Identify and apply trending audio and topics to your own videos
• Monitor your progress

Pentos offers users several different paid plans. A trend analysis-only plan is $99 per month; analyzing your own data and tracking competitors starts at $299 per month.

4. RivalIQ: Best for Improving TikTok Content Engagement

RivalIQ is an in-depth social listening and analysis tool that can help you extract trend insights from your own audience and account data.

You can use the app to:

• Analyze what's being said about your brand
• Explore what kinds of content your competitors are creating
• Identify which of your (and your competitors') post hashtags get the most reach
• See how your account performance compares against benchmarks from top brands on TikTok

While RivalIQ isn't as focused on trend discovery as some of the other options on this list, it's a useful tool for better understanding how different trends, hashtags, and video topics resonate with your audience. You can then use this information to shape your strategy and trend selection going forward.

RivalIQ plans start at $199 per month when billed annually.

What's The Best Way to Find Niche TikTok Trends?

I recommend starting with a dedicated trend spotting tool like Exploding Topics. Once you've found (and created content for) trending topics in your niche or industry, you can level up your process by incorporating more content performance analytics like user engagement rates and video views.

You can get started right now with a free seven-day trial of Exploding Topics Pro — this gives you full access to great trend reports and our full database. If you like what you see, you can easily add our additional TikTok analytics to your account at any time.