Use TikTok Trend Discovery To Grow Your Reach

One of TikTok’s taglines is “Trends start here.” From acting like you’re in a Wes Anderson film to thinking about the Roman Empire, trends truly define TikTok—the platform’s team even publishes an annual trend report on the community’s biggest fixations of the year.

Small business owners can join the fun by participating in TikTok trends, supercharging their social media presence in the process. Shape your own on-trend content using filters, songs, or gags, and then use the trend’s hashtags to reach new users, forge organic connections with existing followers, and grow your audience.

Here are tips for finding and leveraging the latest TikTok trends when making content for your brand.

What are TikTok trends?

TikTok trends are content patterns that become popular among creators on the platform, creating a conversation between videos, creators, and users in the community. Trends can include:

• Prompts (e.g., “tell me without telling me”) 
• Music (e.g., videos set to “Flowers” by Miley Cyrus)
• Choreographed dances (e.g., dances to Lizzo’s “About Damn Time”)
• Challenges (e.g., lip sync challenge)

Businesses can use TikTok trends to inform their social media marketing content. However, TikTok trends can be fleeting—what’s hot right now may not be hot in a week or a month. For brands to take advantage of TikTok trends, they must be flexible and quick, ready to create new content at a moment’s notice.

How you can use TikTok trends for your business

Here’s how you can leverage TikTok trends to make engaging content for your brand:

Increase your reach

In addition to publishing content that aligns with current trends, you can use TikTok’s features to react to, duet with, or stitch together viral videos. The goal is to generate posts in direct dialogue with popular video content, attracting more followers.

While TikTok is famously quiet on the inner workings of its algorithm, trendingvideos are more likely to appear as recommendations on others’ For You pages. Consider this 2023 report from TikTok, which details the way child care brand Makuku built its marketing campaign around two keywords from a trendy hashtag challenge. This resulted in 500% more sales and 20% more offline customers to its storefront.

Create real connections with potential customers

Successful TikTok marketing can increase engagement with a brand’s audience. The platform’s 2024 trend report says, “After seeing an ad on TikTok, viewers trust the brand 41% more, are 31% more likely to be loyal to the brand, and are 33% more likely to say the brand is a good fit for who they are as a person.”

Use trendy, relevant content to reach new audience members and engage them organically.

Learn more about your audience

Even if you don’t want to create trend-informed content, keeping tabs on the latest TikTok trends and influencers can help you determine what really matters to your audience—their interests, dislikes, concerns, pain points, and more.

This data can help you build sales tools like buyer personas and ideal customer profiles, making your marketing more data-driven and targeted.

What is the TikTok Trend Discovery tool?

TikTok’s Trend Discovery tool is a collection of resources within TikTok for Business’s Creative Center. The Trend Discovery tool includes real-time analytics for four main TikTok categories—hashtags, trending songs, creators, and TikTok videos—as well as educational resources.

Use the tool to collect insights on new TikTok trends and take advantage of the most up-to-date data when creating your brand’s content.

6 ways to discover trends on TikTok

1. Use the Trend Discovery tool
2. Use the Inspiration tools
3. Explore TikTok’s Ads Library
4. Browse TikTok
5. Check trends on other platforms
6. Employ social listening tools

Ready to dive into the world of TikTok marketing? Here are some ways to discover fun trends on TikTok and make your next video a hit:

1. Use the Trend Discovery tool

TikTok’s Trend Discovery tool is a part of TikTok for Business’s Creative Center and a great place to begin tracking trends. It collects and presents real-time data across hashtags, trending sounds and songs, creators, and videos, allowing you to see at a glance the hottest TikTok content right now.

The Trend Discovery tool also has reports on the latest trends under the Trend Perspectives tab.

2. Use the Inspiration tools

Also within TikTok for Business’s Creative Center, the Inspiration tab contains a number of resources about ads on the platform. The Top Ads Dashboard and Top Ads Spotlight display the highest-performing ads from competitors on TikTok; other pages let you browse data and TikTok recommendations on keywords, patterns, and products.

3. Explore TikTok’s Ads Library

The Ads Library is a database of every ad that has run on the platform, allowing you to filter by location, ad type, published date, and keywords. Use it to take a look at how your competition advertises and gather ideas about what’s entertaining and what’s not.

4. Browse TikTok

Nothing beats some good old-fashioned primary research. Explore the platform and watch content to identify patterns. Check out your For You page for personalized recommendations, the Discover page for popular hashtags, the Trends page for global trends, and the Trending Searches page for what users are looking up.

You can also go to the search bar in the app to view a drop-down list of trending searches.

5. Check trends on other platforms

Major trends often spill from a single platform onto other social media sites, so look at other short-form videos, such as Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, as one more way to recognize and track which trends might become popular on TikTok.

6. Employ social listening tools

Social listening tools are third-party resources that track social media trends and behaviors related to your industry or brand. Examples of popular tools include Hootsuite Insights, Sprout Social, and Brand24.