Listening to online conversations gives you a competitive edge—but with so many tools out there, finding the right one can be overwhelming.
The real value lies in spotting trends early and understanding the context behind them.
You might be wondering…
How do you find emerging trends?
Which tool tracks real-time conversations?
What’s the best choice for your business?
In this post, we’ll explore the differences between trend discovery and social listening tools. You’ll discover which solution is the best fit for your business needs.
Exploding Topics: A Trend Discovery Powerhouse
Exploding Topics is a tool designed to help users identify emerging trends before they go mainstream. By analyzing millions of searches, social media mentions, and online conversations, it surfaces topics that are gaining traction across various industries.
Core Features of Exploding Topics:
- Trend Explorer: A robust database that lets users explore rising topics across multiple categories, such as business, health, and lifestyle. You can filter by time (from 1 month to 5 years) to spot long-term trends.
- Growth Graphs: Visual representations of how a topic has grown over time, which shows when interest in a subject started accelerating.
- Trend Reports: In-depth reports that explain the growth drivers behind a topic, its potential opportunities and challenges, and actionable insights for businesses.
- Weekly Newsletter: Subscribers receive a curated list of the latest trends directly in their inbox, helping them stay ahead of the curve with minimal effort.
- Industry-Specific Filtering: The platform allows users to explore trends within specific industries, such as tech, business, and consumer products.
- Exploding Topics Pro: A premium version that offers even more detailed insights, historical trend data, and advanced analysis features.
How It Works: Exploding Topics uses AI algorithms to analyze vast amounts of data from search engines, social media, and various other sources. This AI scans for patterns in the data, identifies trends that are growing, and presents them to users before they become widely recognized.
Best For:
- Marketers looking to predict future trends.
- Entrepreneurs wanting to capitalize on emerging opportunities.
- Researchers needing insights into industry shifts.
Social Listening Tools Alternative to Exploding Topics
While Exploding Topics helps users discover future trends, social listening tools focus on monitoring and analyzing real-time conversations and brand sentiment. These tools track mentions of your brand, competitors, or industry topics across social media, forums, news articles, and customer feedback channels.
To help you choose the right platform for your needs, here are three SaaS tools offering valuable insights into trending topics, providing alternatives to Exploding Topics:
1. Trending Content
Trending Content is a comprehensive content intelligence tool that surfaces the most relevant conversations across multiple platforms including Reddit, YouTube, and soon X (formerly Twitter). It connects the dots between audience interests, helping marketers, bloggers, and social teams understand the underlying factors driving trends and enabling them to create more targeted, meaningful content.
- Cross-Platform Trend Analysis: Monitors conversations across Reddit, YouTube, and soon X (Twitter) to identify emerging trends.
- Advanced Filtering: Allows users to filter discussions and pinpoint relevant conversations within specific niches.
- Automatic Trend Detection: Automatically identifies trending topics within a user’s defined industry or area of interest.
- Personalized Organization: Offers topic organization and bookmarking features for easy reference and content planning.
- Real-Time Alerts: Provides immediate notifications when new trends emerge, enabling timely content creation.
- Content Transformation: Helps transform trending topics into engaging, SEO-friendly content that resonates with target audiences.
- Best For: Content creators, marketers, bloggers, and social media teams seeking to develop timely, relevant content and gain a competitive edge.
2. SparkToro
SparkToro helps you figure out who your audience is and where they spend time online. It’s not about trends—it’s about targeting.
- Audience Demographics Mapping: Learn what your audience reads, listens to, and follows.
- Influencer Discovery: Find voices your audience trusts.
- Behavioral Insights: Understand content patterns, habits, and preferences.
- Unique Strength: It uncovers the people and places that matter most to your brand.
- Limitations: Does not track live conversations or viral topics.
- Best For: Businesses defining their target persona and brands planning influencer partnerships or niche campaigns.
3. AnswerThePublic
AnswerThePublic is a visual search listening tool that captures autocomplete suggestions from various platforms like Google, Bing, Amazon, YouTube, TikTok, and more. It helps marketers uncover questions, comparisons, and phrases that people are searching for, making it useful for brainstorming blog topics and optimizing for long-tail keywords.
- Visual Keyword Research: Presents search data in a visually engaging, “wheel” format.
- Question-Based Insights: Identifies questions people are asking related to a specific keyword.
- Comparison & Prepositional Phrases: Reveals comparisons and phrases using prepositions (e.g., “best vs. worst,” “how to use”).
- Broad, Phrase Match, and Long-Tail Keywords: Uncovers a wide range of keyword variations, from broad terms to highly specific long-tail phrases.
- Platform Coverage: Gathers data from Google, Bing, Amazon, YouTube, and TikTok.
- Content Idea Generation: Excellent for brainstorming blog topics, video scripts, and social media content.
- Best For: Marketers and content creators seeking to understand audience questions and generate content ideas based on real search behavior.
Which Tool Should You Choose?
Each tool brings something different to the table, and the best choice depends on the kind of insight you’re after.
- If you want to understand what your audience is asking, especially for SEO-focused content planning and ideation, AnswerThePublic is a strong choice. It visually maps out real search queries—questions, comparisons, and long-tail terms—to help you create content that matches real intent.
- If you’re trying to identify where your audience gathers and who influences them, SparkToro helps you uncover the podcasts they listen to, websites they visit, and voices they trust.
- If you’re hunting for early signals of new trends across industries, Exploding Topics gives you curated insights pulled from search and social data. It surfaces fast-growing topics—like “nomad visas” or “sustainable aviation fuel”—before they hit the mainstream. Great for ecommerce ideas, content creation, and spotting future market opportunities.
But when your goal is to stay ahead of conversations as they unfold, track real-time shifts, and publish content that performs right now—Trending Content is designed for that moment.
It goes beyond keywords. With real-time trend detection, niche topic discovery, and SEO-powered insights across Reddit, YouTube, and soon X—it helps marketers, bloggers, and social teams move fast, stay relevant, and create what matters.
All of these tools offer serious value. But if your content needs to respond to live trends, engage communities, and rank on search—Trending Content gives you the sharpest edge.
