As the Internet progressively moves towards real-time information, the need to know what’s popular right now is becoming increasingly important. Here are the best ways to track trends of all types, so you’ll always be in the know about what’s hot on the Internet.
1. How to track popular Internet video trends
Mag.ma is the definitive source when it comes to tracking what’s hot for Internet videos. It aggregates all the hot videos from sites like YouTube, Vimeo and Daily Motion, takes into account social media buzz, links, positive reviews, how fast views are growing, then and shows you a selection of videos which are up and coming.
Because it tracks chatter from around the web and links to the video as well, using Mag.ma, you’ll usually be able to watch viral videos very early on rather than waiting for it to hit the masses.
2. How to track hot Twitter trends
Trendistic is one of the most visual ways to track Twitter trends out there. What I really like about it is that it helps you understand popular trends, and the tweets that were happening at that particular point in time when the topic became hot. Many other services just show you what’s hot and the current tweets about that topic (you can also get that here), so there is little retrospective understanding about what actually happened when the topic was trending and became viral.
It also offers up some great tools like hourly/weekly/monthly charts, and the ability to embed these charts into your own website.
3. How to track popular search trends
Google Trends Hot List shows you the hottest searches on the web right now. Close to real time, this is probably the single greatest indicator as to what people are searching for now. Google trends of course also allows you to track buzz of any given keyword across time.
Trendy Bing uses Google Trends hot list, but the results are published in Bing instead of Google. The result is a slightly richer experience with videos and photos to complement the search results.
4. How to track popular image trends
Digg Images is my favorite location when I want to find out what images are taking the Internet by storm. While Digg showcases all the most popular content of every genre be it videos/news/tech, the image section is particularly unique as there are few sources online which really capture what images/photos are really popular now.
5. How to track popular news trends
Newsmap is a fantastic visualization tool when it comes to determining what news is hot right now. It aggregates Google News and makes the more popular (the more written about) stories larger and more prominent, so in one glance, you’ll be able to see what’s hot. You can also customize it by topic and location to give you an even more focused look.
6. How to track popular feed subscription trends
Website subscription can be considered the ultimate gauge of reader loyalty. These are people who have signed up and subscribed to your news/blog feed, and want to be notified every time something new comes out. In terms of measuring loyal readers, this measure makes more sense than raw traffic.
Feed Compare is a free way to compare and chart RSS subscription of most websites (if they use feedburner). Just type in the websites you want to compare, choose the timeframe, and just compare away!
7. How to track your email trends
No, there isn’t a service which allows you to track what people are saying on email 🙂 There is however, one called ˜Mail Trends’ which allows you to track what you are saying on Gmail. It allows you to get more insight on key email stats for example:
- Distribution of messages by year, month, day, day of week and time of day.
- The top senders, recipients and mailing lists you’re on.
- The distribution of thread lengths and the lists and people that result in the longest threads
Try it, the results may surprise you.
Do you track any other popular trends? Or do you have different ways of tracking them? Tell us in the comments 🙂
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