Your competitor posted something yesterday about AI regulation in the EU and it went viral. 50,000 views, hundreds of comments, dozens of new followers. You saw it, thought “we should have posted about that,” and moved on with your day.

By the time you see what’s trending, it’s usually already trending. The wave has already started. The question isn’t whether to catch the wave — it’s whether you’re the kind of person who sees a wave forming and knows how to surf it, or the kind who watches it pass and tells themselves they’ll get the next one.

Finding trending topics before they trend is a learnable skill. It has nothing to do with luck and everything to do with the systems you have in place to listen to your market.

Why Most Trendspotting Fails

Most people try to find trends by scrolling Twitter, scanning LinkedIn, and reading industry newsletters. This is passive monitoring — you’re waiting for something to appear in front of you. By the time it does, a hundred other people have already seen it and the window for being early is closing.

Real trendspotting is active. It means building systems that surface signals before they become stories — signals like:

A question that keeps appearing in sales calls and customer conversations
A complaint that shows up repeatedly in reviews of your competitors
A shift in how your industry is talking about a specific problem
A new piece of research that hasn’t been widely discussed yet
A regulatory or economic change that affects your audience

These signals are available to anyone who knows where to look. The founders who consistently find trending topics before they blow up are the ones who built the listening infrastructure to catch them.

The Three Sources of Pre-Trend Signals

There are three places where trends first reveal themselves — before they become trends that everyone is talking about.

First: your own customer conversations. If you’re in B2B, you probably have sales calls, discovery calls, and customer check-ins. What questions keep coming up? What problems do people describe in the same words? What do they wish they’d known before they bought? This is real-time intelligence about what your market is thinking about. Most companies let this intelligence evaporate into meeting notes that nobody reads again.

Second: your competitors’ reviews, comments, and community discussions. Sites like G2, Capterra, and Trustpilot have reviews that contain goldmines of unfiltered customer feedback. So do Reddit threads, industry forums, and LinkedIn comments on competitor posts. The complaints and wishes in these places are the seeds of future content topics — if you’re paying attention.

Third: your own data. What content of yours has performed best over the last 6-12 months? What topics generated the most engagement, the most leads, the most inbound questions? The patterns in your own performance data tell you what your audience cares about. When a new development in one of those topic areas emerges, you’re the first to connect it to your existing audience because you already know they care.

Building Your Trendspotting System

Here’s a practical system that takes about 30 minutes per week:

Monday morning: spend 15 minutes looking at three things. Your Google Analytics and search console — what are people searching to find you? Your social media analytics — which posts performed best this week? Your CRM notes — what questions did your sales team encounter this week?

The goal isn’t to find one big trend. It’s to notice patterns that suggest where the conversation is heading.

Then, once per week, do a broader scan: what’s being discussed in your top 3-5 industry newsletters? What’s showing up in your LinkedIn feed with unusual engagement? Are there any recent studies, reports, or regulatory announcements that your audience should know about?

This 30-minute weekly habit, maintained consistently, will make you appear psychic about industry trends. Not because you’re predicting the future — because you’re paying close enough attention to the present that you see signals before they become stories.

The Competitive Angle

Here’s the more sophisticated version of trendspotting: finding topics that are about to become trends because your competitors haven’t covered them yet, but will soon.

How do you know what your competitors haven’t covered? You look at their content — the topics they’ve posted about in the last 90 days. You identify gaps: they’re clearly in your space, clearly have opinions about X, but haven’t said anything about Y. Y is your opportunity.

Y might be a new piece of legislation that affects your industry. It might be a new technology adoption that changes how your customers think about their problems. It might be an economic shift that creates a new urgency around an old challenge.

You don’t need to be first. You need to be early. There’s a window between “nobody has covered this” and “everyone has an opinion” where the content that gets published enjoys a significant distribution advantage. Be in that window.

When a Trend Does Appear

When you see a trend forming — something that’s clearly gaining momentum — resist the urge to drop everything and publish immediately. The founders who panic-publish rarely produce their best work. Instead:

Ask: what is my specific angle on this? What do I know about this topic that nobody else is saying? What perspective can I add that is uniquely mine? The answers to these questions are what make trend-jumping content actually valuable instead of just noise.

A 20-minute delay in publishing, with 20 extra minutes spent finding your specific angle, produces content that stands out from the flood of hot takes. That’s a better trade than being first with a generic take.

How to Never Miss a Trend Again

The fear of missing trends is really the fear of not having a system. You don’t trust yourself to remember to check for trends, so you live in anxiety about what you might be missing.

The solution isn’t to check more often. It’s to automate the monitoring. Set up Google Alerts for your key industry terms. Use platform-native tools like LinkedIn’s trending topics. Subscribe to the 2-3 newsletters your audience reads most. Check your analytics once per week without fail.

These small, consistent habits are more effective than any single heroic effort to “do research.” You’re not looking for everything — you’re building the habit of noticing.

What to Do With What You Find

Finding a trend before your competitor is only valuable if you can act on it quickly. That means having a system for turning an observation into a piece of content quickly.

If the trend fits content you’ve already planned for the week: adjust your schedule to prioritize it. Move the relevant planned content earlier, or add a new post specifically about the trend.

If the trend is outside your planned content: ask whether it’s genuinely relevant to your audience and your expertise. If yes, create one focused piece — don’t try to cover the entire trend, just your specific angle on it. A focused 500-word take is better than a rushed 2,000-word summary.

The founders who win at trendspotting are the ones who have a system for acting fast without sacrificing quality. That’s a workflow problem as much as a research problem.

If you’re tired of finding trends after they’ve already passed and want a system that helps you spot what’s coming before it arrives, see how Bolta’s content intelligence works. It monitors your industry, surfaces emerging topics, and helps you create content that hits before the wave fully forms.

— Chelsea
Content Strategist · Bolta
(513) 549-6423 · chelsea@bolta.ai · bolta.ai