You might have heard the term “newsjacking” before: the concept of jumping on a recent trend in the news to earn your own attention, engagement, links, and more.

But it’s not the only tactic related to addressing trends with your content. While newsjacking works for bigger, newsworthy happenings in your industry, there are also times when a topic — perhaps launched into fame because of an event — remains trendy over time.

On a national level, think plastic straws, intermittent fasting, shiplap, bitcoin.

We’ve found that capitalizing on longer-term trends in each industry is a content opportunity that hasn’t been as thoroughly explored, especially in more niche areas.

Developing a content calendar is one of the toughest parts of content marketing, so gaining any insight into how you can strategize what to publish and when is extremely valuable.

My colleagues at Fractl and I were interested in exploring this concept more, which is why we reached out to our friends at Exploding Topics; their tool was created to help people identify “exploding” topics relevant to their brand as quickly as possible.

We sought to discover the average longevity of trending topics by vertical.

But first, to understand the data, you have to understand what each Exploding Topics label means:

Let’s take a second to look at the overall picture to see the trending timelines for all of the topics we examined on average.

This means that topics can be relevant for 2+ years! If you can create high-quality content at the beginning of these trends, you can accumulate awareness, traffic, and links for many months after you hit publish.

Now let’s get to the specific stuff.

We recommend examining the blue and orange bars first, as they’re directly related to one another. (The gray bars illustrate when an idea bypasses the “exploding” section altogether and goes straight to peaked.)

Some interesting insights arise immediately:

Knowing these differences between industries can help you make more informed decisions about what to focus on in your content. Because from what we can tell from our tool, there are still plenty of opportunities left to be seized upon.

In every industry, fewer than half of the topics we have logged in our system have peaked. That means there are plenty of trending topics still relevant in every vertical.

To generate the data for the study, we analyzed each topic’s historical search data. Every category we featured had at least 20 topics that have peaked.

Specifically, we ran the Exploding Topics trend classification algorithms on each topic’s timeline data. This determined how long the topic was in each of the defined phases before moving on to the next phase.

As mentioned, these phases are “regular,” “exploding,” and “peaked.” Because of the nature of trending topics and the shape of their search charts, we found that topics usually go from “regular” to “exploding” to “peaked.”

Occasionally topics even repeated this cycle during the course of its search history. In almost all cases, the biggest trend cycle was the most recent one. So in this situation, we used the latest cycle. These will be the most relevant and reliable predictor of the lifespans of trending topics currently.

Often topics would also skip the “exploding” phase entirely and never exhibit upwards curving growth. They would instead just have strong upwards growth in a straight line, and then at some point search demand would pop and fizzle out.

So we included this as “regular” to “peaked” trend lifespan data. Even though these topics never exploded, they still provide great opportunity to capitalize on trending topics, so it was valuable to include them in the analysis.