Finding B2B Social Media Trends
Everyone of else has probably seen, and perhaps have taken part in, some sort of social media trend in the past. What makes trends so important in terms of social media performance is that, when your content is related to a trending topic, there is a possibility to show off your profile’s creativity or even to go viral. However, trends go way beyond simply looking at what the trending topics are at a given moment. This is especially the case when talking about social media trends for businesses who may not be so much interested in viral trends but rather niche trends that are happening in their industry or field. This can be important when companies and brands are trying to expand their reach and grow their brand. After all, detecting trends and utilizing them in your content strategy can yield positive results for your overall social media performance. The question is, how can you keep up with social media trends that relate to your business?
In this article, we are going to focus on how to find trends on social media and the tools you need to do so effectively. Simply purchasing a subscription to a social media tool is not enough to really research and understand trends in a way that can help your content. This is because trends in social media are more than just viral topics that are going around. The truth is that trends actually touch on many different characteristics of a post.
Our goal is to show you how to find social media trends for your industry or field, as well as within the region or language that you are working in. Learning how to conduct social media trends research goes beyond just looking for a popular topic in your field of interest and touches on all parts of your content including hashtags, posting time, and content formats. In order to show you how to research all these trends, we will go through some real-world examples. In doing so, we will pay special attention to how to find B2B social media trends that are focused on helping businesses who are working in the B2B field. This is to better highlight the various research techniques we will discuss.
What are Social Media Trends?
Your first thought of a trend revolves around a particular topic, and this is probably not wrong. Content that is successful may often have some connection to particular topics, themes, or events that are “in” which helps drive reach and engagement. When many people talk about social media trends, they are typically talking about a specific topic that someone is talking about. This can be an event, a challenge, or some person, organization, or movement. Sometimes these trends are confined to a social media network, or sometimes they are trending on multiple social media networks. Trends can also be focused on a particular content niche or geographical part of the world, or be circulating among those who speak a certain language.
However, trends can also mean other things that have a more analytic focus and should not be ignored. In this article, we will talk about some of the primary trends you can research in terms of hashtags, content formats, posting times, and content creators. These are trends that go beyond simply the topics that are popular. They are important to research so you can better craft your content strategy and find out what may help your performance.
If you are a business, discovering social media trends early can help you extend your reach and create better optimized content for your target audience. However, you may be wondering how to keep up with social media trends since there are so many things to be on the lookout for. This requires a process as well as the right tool. In the rest of the article, we are going to discuss how to set up your process to find social media trends, with a focus on B2B social media trends.
Setting up your Social Media Trends Analysis
Let’s start out with an important point about the difference between social media research and social media analytics when it comes to trends. Keep in mind that social media analytics focuses on specific profiles that you identify as competitors or ones that are similar to yours. The profiles you add to your dashboard in a social media analytics tool will give you the data points for your analysis as well as the insights you gain when analyzing this data. This includes finding specific content optimization opportunities and conducting various benchmarking and competitor analysis tasks. The advantage of this is that you get to determine the profiles you are analyzing so you can be more certain that your data points are relevant and precise.
Social media research is a more expansive technique and looks at much larger data sets that may not be as focused as looking at just a handful of profiles. This doesn’t mean you cannot search for certain trends, but the data set will most likely be much larger than the one you use for analytics. However, with the right social media research tool, you can apply a variety of filters to detect trends in your industry, content interests, or field.
Let’s then talk about how you can use filters to focus on finding trends that are important for your social media profiles. There are three main areas that you need to be aware of. The first is to apply keywords to essentially narrow your search field down to a specific topic. This allows you to focus on one more keyword that represents the overall topic, industry, or field that you want to research. The second area has to do with the language and/or country. Sometimes you may want to look for trends that are related to a certain language. Other times, there may simply be a target country that you want to concentrate on because that is where your target audience resides. The last area relates to the social media network(s) you are active on. You may want to research social media trends on all social media networks or just one or two particular ones. This means you need to decide what networks are relevant for you.
To find current trends on social media, you need to apply the right research techniques and use the right tools. This is especially important when looking for B2B social media trends since these may be more difficult to detect. In showing you how to do social media trend research, we will be using Fanpage Karma’s Discovery tool that is designed to help detect social media trends. This tool utilizes a database of millions of profiles and billions of posts that are used in order to detect trends. All of the charts and graphs below have been taken from this tool.
Our overview about how to conduct social media trends research will be broken down into 5 specific areas. In going through our social media trends analysis, we will focus on:
- Topics
- Hashtags
- Content Formats
- Posting Times
- Content Creators, Brands, and Influencers
1. Topics
You may already be looking for the top B2B social media trends 2025 by simply running through your feed. However, the reality is that looking for broad trends or simply skimming through posts doesn’t really cut it in the B2B field. This is because B2B social media trends typically don’t have as big of an audience early on due to their niche nature, making them harder to detect. There are two ways that you can think about researching trends on social media in terms of topics that may not be immediately noticeable.
First, you can look at trending posts according to a specific metric. For the most part, the metrics that you will look at have to do with interaction, either in terms of a specific metric such as likes or post interaction rate. This requires a topic research tool that allows you to filter with keywords to find social media trends that relate to those keywords. When you use a keyword or keywords to narrow down your search of a particular industry or main topic area, you may be able to detect certain sub-topics or characteristics of posts that are trending or find out exactly what those trends are about. This is because you can clearly see what posts are generating the most reactions. This can help you decide if those topics are relevant for you, and can also help boost engagement for your content if you integrate those themes well. Below, we can see an example of this when looking globally on Facebook and Instagram when filtering for “Accounting Software” topics.
The second way is to look at an entire industry or field using the same keyword filter and then look at a list of the top 50 keywords of posts that are using the main keyword are have chosen. This technique relates to using keyword research to detect social media trends that are part of an overall topic. In this case, you would look for the most used keywords and the average post interaction rates associated with posts that use those keywords. Similar to the first technique above, you should also use filters as much as possible so you know that the main topic areas are relevant for your own interests.
2. Hashtags
Hashtags are another important area when talking about trends. This is because so many people use hashtags to show that they content relates to a certain trend. However, how can you see what hashtags may be trending in a specific industry or field? In this case, it is helpful to use a social media discovery tool that has hashtags research functions. These tools can help you find what hashtags you may want to use if you are following trends in your industry.
When talking about social media trends for B2B fields, perhaps one of the most interesting example that we can use has to do with Customer Relation Management (CRM) software. What type of hashtag trends can you detect in order to give you an idea of which ones you should keep an eye on or considering? In this case, we have utilized our social media tool to analyze Instagram and Facebook to look for these hashtags related to the U.S. market.
As we see in the chart below, there is a word chart of hashtags that show how often a hashtag was used (the size of the hashtag with the larger hashtags meaning those were used more often) and the average post interaction rate for those posts that used a hashtag (color of the hashtag with the greener the color the better). When viewing the chart, we can get a good idea of what hashtags we may want to consider using in our own posts.
You can also do look at trends with a social media analytics tool as well. In this case, we can look at social media analytics trends in terms of hashtags precisely for profiles that are in our tracking dashboard. As opposed to the technique above that pulls in data for all profiles that are associated with the keyword(s) you indicate, using a social media analytics tool allows you to add only certain profiles to your analysis. We have written about the process of hashtag research specifically for Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Pinterest, YouTube, and Twitter/X before if you are interested in reading more about these research techniques for each network.
3. Content Formats
You may not always think about it, but there may be certain social media content formats that perform better than others in certain industries. In this sense, understanding what content formats are preferred by a certain audience can be an important content optimization tip. However, how can you actually conduct this research with a high degree of accuracy?
In terms of detecting B2B social media trends when it comes to content formats, it can be as simple as using filters to indicate what field or industry you are interested in as well as what market or language you want to focus on. You should also make sure that your social media research tool allows you to analyze the content formats of posts as well. In order to give you a concrete example, let’s look at a similar situation that we discussed above and analyze the topic of CRM in the U.S. for Instagram and Facebook. This can be an interesting analysis since there are different types of content formats to choose from when you post on these networks.
After viewing the data above, we probably want to think about posting carousels most often, since these seem to be preferred by this target audience. As you can see, with this type of analysis, you can begin to get a better understanding of what content formats you should be using when planning your content strategy.
4. Posting Times
A social media analytics trend that many are interested in relates to researching the best times to post. This can be important when discussing B2B social media trends, since your target audience may only be active at very certain times, and you want to post in the ideal timeframe. Posting at the right time can help you with engagement which, in turn, can boost your standing with algorithms of the social media networks you are posting on.
Similar to the examples above, if you are looking for social media trends in terms of posting times, it is important to make sure you are narrowing your search results as much as possible. This means using keywords that represent the industry or field you are interested in, as well as looking at certain countries if you don’t have a global audience. Looking at a certain language may also be helpful. However, if there is a language such as English or Spanish that is spoken in many countries in different timezones, your results may not be as precise as you may want, so focusing on a specific country may be the way to go.
We should also point out that, similar to hashtags, with the right social media analytics tool, you can conduct a best time to post analysis specially for profiles you choose. We have written about this topic extensively for Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, Twitter/X, and Pinterest, so check out those articles if you want to find out more.
5. Top Content Creators, Brands, and Influencers
Who are the biggest influencers in your industry? Are there content creators that can help inspire you when planning your own content? Researching social media trends also involves finding those who are trend setters or those who are performing well in your industry. This can help you identify the profiles and creators who you should keep a close eye on.
Finding out what creators are performing well is a type of trend in itself. This can include normal content creators, influencers, or even brands. Of course, choosing the right filters is important here in terms of industry/field, country, and/or language as we talked about above. However, your social media research tool should be able to also filter for profiles whether they are brand profiles or other influencers, so you can better identify profiles by these specifications. This is valuable if you are looking to see what specific influencers are doing right, or if you want to better track brands in your industry that have large followers.
In the example below, you can see the top brands that are discussing Content Management Systems (CMS) and are active on a global level across Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, and Pinterest. If you are working in this field and want to study these profiles more closely, you can track them long term with a social media analytics tool.
Discovering Social Media Trends for Businesses
There are other types of trends you can detect that we haven’t addressed in this article that includes sentiment, correlations between metrics, and number of overall posts about a specific topic. At the end of the day, there is a lot you can research with the right tool. That is why it is so important to have a social media research tool that gives you everything you need to discover trends that interest you. Ideally, this would be paired with a strong social media analytics tool that then allows you to conduct deeper research social media trends for particular businesses that you choose to track in your dashboard.
If you want to find social media trends for your business, you should try Fanpage Karma’s free 14-day trial. This tool offers strong research features along with analytics, community management, monitoring, and publishing capabilities. Better yet, it also offers unlimited profile tracking and analysis that boosts the power of benchmarking and content optimization insights.
You can also sign-up for the free weekly webinar that shows you every feature of this “all-in-one” social media tool.
