5 Ways To Research Key Trends for Social Media Ad Campaigns

Building this into your approach could help to round out your marketing messaging.

3. Pinterest Trends

While it’s less of a social app, and more of a shopping platform these days, Pinterest has become a valuable tool in guiding product discovery, with 80% of weekly Pinterest users noting that they are inspired to shop based on what they find in the app.

And with 578 million users, and growing, Pinterest is becoming a bigger consideration in this respect. Which also makes it a valuable tool for gleaning insight into shopping trends.

Pinterest Trends lets you search for trending Pins based on any keyword, so that you can dig into specific topics and elements that relate to your brand.

That could give you more perspective on shopping-focused queries and questions, which could then help to shape your communications and promotions.

4. Grok

Whether you personally are still using X or not, the platform remains a key connector for real-time discussion, and is still reportedly being used by over 600 million people every month.

Yes, X has its own political and speech concerns, under the guidance of Elon Musk. But as a marketer, you need to be showing up where your audience is active, while the breadth of X discussion could also be relevant to your brand, and helping to build your outreach program.

Grok, xAI’s chatbot tool, which is powered by X posts, could be a valuable guide on this front.

Grok can’t provide up-to-the-minute insights, as it’s not ingesting all X post data in real-time, but it can provide close to live updates on key trends and shifts, on any topic.

So if you already know your key subjects, you can ask Grok what’s trending in relation to those terms on X as well for additional trend insight. Just make sure you word your queries to be X specific, or hone in on specific elements.

It could be a valuable accompaniment to your broader research effort.

5. AI-Powered Ad Tools

This is less about personal research, and more about letting the machines do the research on your behalf.

Every social media platform has now introduced at least some form of AI-powered targeting within its ad system, and these automated targeting options are getting better and better at recognizing usage patterns, and understanding what ad content will be most relevant to each individual user.

Indeed, Meta recently reported that its AI ad tools drove a 6% increase in average conversions in the most recent quarter.

I mean, it makes sense that AI systems would be valuable for this purpose, as AI tools are designed to recognize patterns in large groupings of data, which should mean that they’re able to correlate interests and activity on a far broader scope than anything that’s come before.

What that means for your process, however, is that it might be worth testing out each platform’s AI-enabled ad targeting, and letting the machines choose your ad audience for you, in order to see whether they might be able to find a broader audience that’ll be interested in your products and services.

Meta has Advantage+, TikTok enables AI-creation and targeting via its Symphony platform, Pinterest has Performance+, X ads are now using Grok for targeting, LinkedIn offers Performance Max and Accelerate.

There’s a range of options to consider, and it may be worth trying them out, even in limited form, to see just how far they’ve come, and whether they can drive improved performance for your campaigns.

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