Brands need insight into consumer trends in real-time. They must have the capability to “nowcast” the next three to six-month period in order to stay in front of rapid changes and multiple influential variables, including tribes, events, competitors, social media crises. The only way to achieve this is via access to comprehensive social media data that has been structured in terms of each of these brand-specific variables. That's us!
Tracking a trend enables to get a deep understanding of what (future) consumers want and create compelling products and experiences ahead of the competition.
How to understand your industry topics & trends
Before:
Define the trends and topics that we want to monitor. If you don't have predefined trends, start listening to your industry through specialized media / Influencers corpus to spot rising trends.
Understand what you are looking for and what are the questions you are aiming to answer. Topic exploration can be also based on an intuition you want to confirm with data or can be based on preliminary work you have done via other mediums (agencies, personae identification).
Formulate questions, hypotheses and issues to be addressed
Evaluate what are the expected results, what ideal content & indisghts should look like - "Do people share their favorite pre workout meals on the social web?"
Run initial version of the query on a limited set or adjust existing queries
Evaluate relevance and identify sources of noise
Validate hypotheses or go back to the drawing board
During:
Is this really a trend? Does people talk about it?
Take a look at volumes of conversation (posts&reports) and the engagement actions.
How is the trend spreading? Observe the split by platform:
Majority of tweets: very conversational
Majority of Instagram posts: very visual
Majority of articles on websites and blogs: PR and corporate content
Observe the wordcloud to discover new keywords and emerging trends or sub topics to feed and deep dive.
Depending on the trend or type of topic you want to analyze, we recommend to set up a report to have a recurrent follow up (weekly, monthly) to see the evolution of the trend.
Example
A sporting goods retailer wanted to understand what the people thought about freerun and parkour. By looking at the people talking about this topic, we found out that parkour was a term widely used by Minecraft gamers.
Based on the insight found on Radarly, the company could open at a different audience and targeting gamers, by organizing an event in real life, or sponsoring e-sports events.
Tips & Tricks
If you're doing a broad search, rule out trends you've already spotted. This will facilitate the discovery of new trends.
Instagram hashtag search bar to look for specific terms and relevant hashtags.
💡 Tip
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