Trend Finders: 9 Tools That Show You Emerging Trends
While your social media feed and industry publications often contain plenty of trends, it's time-consuming to comb through each of these resources and identify trends.
In addition, if your entire industry is already talking about a trend, it might have already peaked.
So to help you gain a competitive edge and learn about emerging trends before they explode, here are some trend finder tools that make it easy to discover new trends.
- Exploding Topics – Best Business Trend Finder (Free And Paid)
- Google Trends – Best Free Trend Finder
- Trend Hunter – Best Pop Culture Trend Finder
- Axios Pro Policy – Best Political Trend Finder
- Trends.Co – Best Trend Finder Community
- Pulsar Platform – Best Audience Trend Finder
- Crayon.Co – Best Competitive Intelligence Trend Finder
- Podcast Notes – Best Podcast Trend Finder
- TikTok Trend Discovery – Best Gen Z Trend Finder
Exploding Topics – Best Business Trend Finder (Free and Paid)
Most trend finders show topics that are currently trending, so how do you find trends before they become popular?
We couldn’t find a good answer to this question, so we built Exploding Topics to spot under-the-radar trends.
The flagship product is the Trends Database which contains over 14,000 emerging trends relevant to business use cases.
Each trend is either a product, brand, or industry keyword, and you can sort by category (fashion, marketing, tech, fitness, pets, etc.) to quickly find trends relevant to your industry.
You’ll notice that each trend also has a graph that represents the keyword’s historical Google search volume over time (you can adjust the timeframe, though the default is five years).
When you find an interesting trend, you can save it for further analysis by clicking “Track Topic” and then add it to a Project. You can create as many Projects as you like, and you’ll be able to access them from the main dashboard:
So how good is the quality of trends in Exploding Topics?
Are they selected based on data or an analysts’ subjective opinion? Is there any data suggesting that topics still have more growth potential? And how can you be sure it won’t miss the next big trend in your industry?
To answer these questions, here’s a snapshot of our trend identification and qualification strategy:
Exploding Topics also has a handful of other features that you can use to find and analyze trends. Here are a few of them:
- Meta Trends: The Meta Trends dashboard shows you growing niches within a larger industry and the top products and brands associated with those niches. An example of a Meta Trend is “Kid-focused fintech.”
- Weekly Reports: Weekly Reports cover five trending startups and five trending products, so it’s super easy for you to stay up-to-date with the latest trends in just a few minutes per week. You can also view past Weekly Reports in the Exploding Topics dashboard.
- Trends Search: The Trends Database is excellent for finding new trends, but if you already have a topic in mind and want to gauge its growth potential as a trend, you can use Trends Search to view its historical Google Search volume data. Trends Search also shows related trending topics and “People Also Search For” keywords.
You can try out these features for free today by joining Exploding Topics Pro now. Pro members also receive access to premium trends and advanced search features that aren’t available in the free Trends Database.
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Free Plan? | Yes – It’s entirely free |
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Google Trends – Best Free Trend Finder
Google Trends is a free trend tool that allows you to type in any keyword and quickly pull up a report on its historical Google Search volume.
You can use this historical search volume data to assess a topic's long-term growth potential.
The main drawback of Google Trends is that it isn't very helpful for trend discovery because it doesn't provide trend suggestions – it only shows you data on keywords that you enter.
While it offers a "related searches" tab, many of these topics are either irrelevant or so close to the main keyword you typed in that none of the suggestions are new to you.
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Free Plan? | Yes – It’s entirely free |
Pricing
Google Trends is free to use.
Trend Hunter – Best Pop Culture Trend Finder
Trend Hunter has a large database of topics ranging from trending beauty items to the latest diet fads.
It's great for consumer brands and social media content creators looking for the hottest new trends from the past week.
You can sort by categories like fashion, luxury, and culture, and each topic has its own page with a description, images, and trend score. The trend score, which is used to rank trends in the database, is calculated based on three criteria:
- Freshness
- Activity
- Popularity
The engagement and popularity scores are derived from Trend Hunter's website visitors' engagement with that trend in comparison to their engagement with other trends in the Trend Hunter database.
So it's a fun website to find unique trending pop culture topics, but it's not the best for business professionals looking for reliable data to make investment decisions as the Trend Hunter website visitors probably aren't perfectly aligned with your target audience.
It also isn't designed to find long-term trends, as a key part of the overall score is freshness. If you're only looking at recent trends, they may have already peaked, or they might be fads that disappear in a few weeks.
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Free Plan? | Yes – You can look at trending topics for free, but reports are paid. |
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Axios Pro Policy – Best Political Trend Finder
Axios Pro is a news source outlet, and they recently released a Policy offering that provides detailed coverage of healthcare, energy, and tech policy trends.
This makes it easy for healthcare, tech, and energy professionals to stay up-to-date with the latest news and industry trends.
When you sign up for Axios Pro Policy, you'll receive newsletters, alerts, and exclusive stories from their journalists, who have insider access to exclusive news coverage inside congress.
Several sources say that Axios leans slightly left, though it's one of the less biased news sources.
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Free Plan? | Yes |
Pricing
There’s a 14-day free trial and $1,199 for annual subscription after that.
Trends.co – Best Trend Finder Community
Trends.co is for startup founders and tech enthusiasts looking for new business ideas and trends.
While most trend finder tools are structured as databases or news sources, Trends.co is the only trend finder on this list that is primarily a community.
The active Facebook community has plenty of successful entrepreneurs, making it a great resource to ask for feedback and brainstorm ideas with other like-minded individuals. The Trends.co team also interviews successful entrepreneurs and writes breakdown blog posts explaining how these founders built their businesses.
The downside of Trends.co is that the value you receive from it correlates directly with how much effort you put into engaging with the community. So there isn't just a simple database where you can extract trend ideas.
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Free Plan? | No – It’s a paid community |
Pricing
Trends.co is $299 per year.
Pulsar Platform – Best Audience Trend Finder
The Pulsar platform is excellent for brands and marketers that already have a product/service and want to stay up-to-date with the latest trends their audience is discussing.
You can monitor specific communities, and Pulsar will give you detailed insights into topics and trends they're discussing. Or, you can take the reverse approach and determine which audiences are discussing a particular trend you're researching. It even surfaces specific influencers talking about the trend you're monitoring.
Pulsar platform also gives you analytics of trend history so that you can see interest in a specific trend over time. This is helpful if you want to gauge the long-term growth potential of a trend.
Audience data is pulled from all the mainstream social media platforms you'd expect (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, etc.), as well as industry-specific social media channels like Sermo.
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Free Plan? | No – It’s a paid community |
Pricing
Pulsar platform does not offer its pricing information publicly, though it is an enterprise tool.
Crayon.co – Best Competitive Intelligence Trend Finder
Your top competitors also monitor industry trends, so one easy way to stay on top of trends is to use a competitive intelligence tool to watch the competition's every movement.
Crayon.co makes this easy. It allows you to track your competitors':
- Messaging and positioning
- Product, pricing, and packaging strategy
- Team shifts and hiring activity
- News and press releases
- Customer reviews
- Partners and clients/customers
Competitive intelligence is an excellent method to find the highest quality trends because it shows which trends companies are actively investing in.
It's easy for people to say they believe in a particular trend, but it's much more meaningful when you see companies investing in a trend.
For example, suppose you see that all of your competitors are hiring AI engineers. That's much more substantial evidence that AI adoption will probably be an important long-term trend in your industry than if you just see them talking about it on Twitter.
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Free Plan? | No |
Pricing
Crayon.co does not offer pricing information, though it is an enterprise product and might not be appropriate for smaller companies.
Podcast Notes – Best Podcast Trend Finder
Podcast Notes is like SparkNotes for podcasts – it extracts key insights from podcast episodes and presents them in easy-to-read notes.
So if you have a broad topic idea in mind, like "how to pitch an idea," you can type it into Podcast Notes, and it will quickly pull up a list of popular podcasts that mention that trend or idea.
This is a great resource to find quotes from influencers like Peter Attia, Andrew Huberman, or Tim Ferriss in seconds.
The downside is that it doesn't really find trends for you. Instead, you must have a general idea of the topic you want to search, and then Podcast Notes shows you relevant podcast episodes on that topic and corresponding notes.
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Free Plan? | Yes – It offers a handful of free podcast episode notes, but the topic search feature is exclusively offered in the premium plan. |
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TikTok Trend Discovery – Best Gen Z Trend Finder
TikTok recently released its Trend Discovery platform, which lets creators see the latest trending:
- Songs
- Videos
- Creators
- Hashtags
It's a useful tool for TikTok content creators to find trending topics and create their own unique spin on a popular trend.
It's also great for consumer brands that serve Gen Z audiences, as they can use it to improve marketing messaging and even think of new product ideas.
However, it’s not as relevant for B2B brands and anyone looking for long-term trends.
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Free Plan? | Yes – It’s a free tool |
Pricing
TikTok’s Trend Discovery tool is free.
Selecting The Best Trend Finder For Your Needs
Each of the trend finders above are designed for different use cases, but if you’re an investor, entrepreneur, or business executive looking for emerging trends with long-term growth potential, consider Exploding Topics.
You can see for yourself how easy it is to find hundreds of high-quality, relevant emerging trends in seconds by jumping into the free Exploding Topics database now.
Or, if you want to unlock thousands of premium trends, save them to projects, and access more advanced trend finding features, try Exploding Topics Pro today.