Using Twitter & Google Hot Trends to Find New Things to Talk About

Posted by Eric Hebert on May 25, 2011 in Marketing | Comments

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Using Twitter & Google Hot Trends to Find New Things to Talk About

So I sat down with the boys from Villains Like You last night to discuss blogging strategies now that we finally have a solid design down for their new site. A lot was discussed, but one of the things that stood out was keeping up with what’s in the news and using current events as inspirations for content. What ended up happening was a discussion about a song they had just written after seeing the tornado destruction in the south, which turned into them actually scheduling studio time to record the track in a few weeks, setting up a relief fund, and more. In an hour we had taken the subject of what’s going on in the world and turned it into a solid goal for the band to focus on over the summer.

What’s going on in the news is important to you whether you like it or not, and if you want to be a savvy musician and business owner, staying on top of news and trends is smart. If can be serious news like a natural disaster that inspires you to write a new song, or perhaps find that you just want to support a relief cause or whathaveyou. On the opposite end of the spectrum could be a pop culture trend that’s picking up steam – think of Rebecca Black a month back and all the people that started covering her tune “Friday”. If you were savvy, you saw that as an opportunity to be a part of the news, a part of what’s gathering steam in the world around you.

So how can you stay on top of the news 24/7? You could watch CNN all day but let’s be honest, when things end up hitting the actual news, it means the story has hit it’s proverbial ceiling and has probably been trending on Google and Twitter in the days and hours before. So you wanna start there and use these two super-cool tools to keep in top of what’s hot right this moment.

Google Reader + Google Hot Trends

If you already have an RSS reader then cool, if not I suggest using Google Reader to subscribe to feeds. If you don’t know what RSS is then you’re living in a cave and missing out on the single greatest thing about the Internet (the ability to consume content at an incredibly fast rate).

Anywho, subscribe to the Google Hot Trends feed and you’ll get updated throughout the day on all the hot “trending” search terms. This is by far an AWESOME tool to see what people are searching for any given hour of the day. Take advantage of things that you can write a blog post about that obviously ties into your music or brand, and you might get a shot of getting some of that search traffic, especially if you can beat everyone else and get your content ranking for the keyword in question (obviously really popular or generic people and keywords you’re not going to rank for – but the Rebecca Black example works; imagine being one of the first people to cover the song, post it to YouTube, then blog about it!)

Twitter Acquires Tweetdeck – Awesome Tool to Track Trends (and Yourself)

You might have heard the speculation, and it finally was confirmed today, that Twitter has acquired desktop client Tweetdeck, and your good reason – the application kicks major ass.

The first and most useful reason to use Tweetdeck is that it allows you to track a number of different things going on – your friends’ Tweets, and tweets mentioning your Twitter username, and keywords (your name for example), etc. You can set up a number of columns to see who’s talking about what in real time. I use it to keep track of all my clients whenever they are mentioned.

And just like Google Hot Trends, Tweetdeck allows you to set up columns based on what’s trending on Twitter as well, using the hashtag as the keyword(s) that’s becoming popular. You can then explore why it’s becoming popular and if you have something relevant to say about it, include the hashtag in your tweet and those searching for it will more than likely see your comment.

Not sure what a hashtag is? Check out this power point I put together a few years ago for SearchCamp (I unfortunately did not give the presentation live due to scheduling conflicts, but it’s still a good one!)