So I’m going to let you in on a little secret. It’s one of my insider techniques for tracking how ‘hot’ things are right now. Have you heard of it? It’s google.com/trends. It’s totally free, and on this cool tool, you can see how much of the world is searching particular keywords at the moment, and in turn, just how ‘trendy’ or how much ‘interest’ there is in any particular topic.

I use this tool sometimes when planning what training and products to role out. For instance, we had a hunch that a lunchtime webinar on the topic of Influencer Marketing might go down well. So we went and had a looksie on… you guessed it, Google Trends. The results might astound you:

So are people interested in influencer marketing at the moment and is interest growing? Um yes, I guess you could say that!

So next thought was, ‘which social networks are trending’. First up I searched Snapchat as my hunch was that this would be trending quite high at the moment. And it was:

And I wondered how Instagram was going in comparison. After all, it’s definitely hit mainstream status in the past 12 months. Check it out:

Many people ask me when I do public speaking ‘so if Instagram is so trendy right now, is Facebook dying?’ I always answer no, and remind people that Facebook owns Instagram (a very strategic acquisition indeed) and that Facebook has more targetted marketing than anything available on the planet at the moment so it’s still very powerful.

So I guess I interpret this graph not so much as people aren’t using it, it’s just that they know what Facebook is now, so they’ve moved on and don’t need to search it up on Google like they used to:

Alright, so if Facebook is trending downwards, how is Twitter doing I wondered:

Hmm downwards too! What about good old YouTube then? People like video right?

Yep they do. It’s doing just fine thanks. Holding steady.

And what about our prickly friend Pinterest?

Yep it was indeed a big year in 2012 for Pinterest when they rolled out business pages and everyone got on the band wagon. And it’s surprisingly held steady ever since.

I almost cringed searching up G+. How bad would their graph be? It was bad alright:

So there you have it. Influencer marketing is trendy right now. So is Instagram. So is Snapchat. YouTube is solid as a rock, Pinterest a surprising solid entry too and Google Plus, well, you just underwhelmed us all a bit really (though we still use you).

Did these results surprise you? What else would you like to see searched? Do you already use Google Trends to search out business opportunities? Tell us more!