Research system · 8 minute read

How to find trending topics your customers actually care about

A practical five-step method for finding rising topics with enough customer, source and engagement evidence to justify creating content.

1. Start with a customer-language WordBank

List the product category, jobs customers are trying to complete, recurring objections, comparison phrases, symptoms of the problem and specialist terms customers use. “Database” is broad; “ask questions across production databases” is closer to a real job.

2. Add competitors as context, not the whole market

Competitor posts reveal positioning and formats, but customer conversations reveal demand. Monitor both. A competitor’s high-performing announcement may say more about its audience size than the topic itself.

3. Collect evidence over a useful window

One day is often noise. Compare recent activity with a longer baseline such as 30 or 90 days. Retain the original post URL, timestamp, author and every engagement field the source exposes.

4. Rank breadth, momentum and engagement separately

Mentions measure volume. Unique authors measure breadth. Engagement measures visible response. Freshness helps surface movement. A good trend score considers all four without pretending they are interchangeable.

5. Read the evidence before choosing an angle

Open the strongest posts and comments. Identify the customer’s actual tension: uncertainty, frustration, comparison, surprise or aspiration. Then choose a format that resolves that tension—a teardown, checklist, contrarian explanation, benchmark or firsthand workflow.

The final brief

A usable brief contains the topic, why it matters now, the audience, two or three source links, the angle, a promised takeaway and a platform-appropriate format. What’s Trending assembles these inputs from the WordBank and monitored public evidence so the idea remains traceable to its source.