How to Predict Next Year’s Business Trends

Have you been wondering how to predict next year’s business trends? If so, you are not alone. After all, being able to predict near-term trends can give your business a massive advantage. You could do everything from developing new products to capitalize on those trends to ensuring that you don’t follow a trend that is slowly or rapidly dying off. In other words, being able to accurately predict next year’s business trends can go a long way in helping you accomplish your business goals. 

But having said this, the actual process of predicting next year’s business trends may seem extremely difficult. None of us has a crystal ball. We cannot estimate the future with 100% certainty. However, what we can do is look at the trends that are on the rise right now and make an educated guess on what trends will emerge in the future.

In this post, I want to further explain this process of how you can predict next year’s business trends. By sticking with me and implementing these principles, you can better shape your overall business strategy or even create more relevant YouTube videos or social media posts.

Valuable Tools to Predict Trends

Predicting future trends is more art than science. However, there is good news in your corner. There are plenty of free resources that can give you some key hints on current and upcoming trends. You’ll definitely want to pay attention to these resources, as they can be the catalyst for your next business strategy pivot or content idea.

Twitter

When thinking about how to predict next year’s business trends, I want to discuss one resource that all of us know and love. It is Twitter. While social media platforms like Twitter may have their negative points, Twitter can be a fabulous source for identifying trends. This is because you can actually follow real people. These people are tweeting about new ideas or concepts that interest them. Depending on the people that you follow, you may be able to use their unique insights to capitalize on the trend that they have identified.

One thing that I have found useful on Twitter is to follow the founders or creators of the products that you use every day. These men and women are focused on creating the most valuable and relevant products for all of their users. Because of this, I’ve found that they are at the forefront of trends that are (and will) resonate among our population. Ultimately, you want to find these people on Twitter and see what they talk about. Most likely, they will be talking about new trends before everyone else.

Resources That Track Trends

Beyond Twitter, I recommend that you check out several different websites that track trending topics for you. These websites can give you a quick and easy way to see what people are talking about and what trends may continue into the future.

 For instance, feel free to visit ExplodingTopics.com. At Exploding Topics, you can see rapidly growing topics before they take off. You can browse what is currently trending or you can leverage the website’s search option to find momentum (if any) around a specific idea or topic. Ultimately, Exploding Topics is a great resource to help you better identify which trends are occurring or will occur in the future.

There is also Google Trends. In all likelihood, you’ve used Google Trends before. Like Exploding Topics, you can enter a search term or browse items or concepts that are trending right now. That being said, there is a key difference between Google Trends and Exploding Topics. Google Trends just tracks when people are searching on Google. On the other hand, sites like Exploding Topics use a wider variety of sources to track what trends are happening. 

The good news? These sources aren’t mutually exclusive. You can use both Google Trends and websites like Exploding Topics to get a great picture of what is (and will be) trending. In fact, you should likely be using both of these options, as they give you slightly different, yet extremely relevant trend ideas. Google Trends is one of the most well-known trend watching resources because of the size and scale of Google itself. However, Exploding Topics is cool because of its proprietary algorithm. That algorithm will give you what it thinks are the trending topics of the timeframe that you are looking to explore. 

This naturally leads to one final point. By searching for trends on Exploding Topics or Google Trends, I recommend that you filter your data. By filtering, I mean looking at trends that were happening in a certain period of time. For instance, you can look at trends from the past three months or the past year. From there, see the differences between both data sets. By engaging in this exercise, you may get a better sense of what the future may hold. 

Product Hunt

From Exploding Topics and Google Trends, let’s talk about Product Hunt. If you are a startup founder or are involved in the tech industry, you have likely already heard of Product Hunt. If not, it is a website where creators all around the world share the products and apps that they are working on. Once these creators and entrepreneurs post their products to the website, the Product Hunt community upvotes the products that they like.

Product Hunt is a great way to see new trends in the form of products that are launching. This can be everything from services and apps to new B2B tools. It comes down to tracking many different sources and seeing what is resonating with the Product Hunt audience. 

YouTube

Even though we may think of YouTube as a way to learn something new or take a quick break from work, it can be a great way to identify new trends. The vast majority of views on YouTube are from discovery. They are from the YouTube algorithm recommending a piece of content that people watch. 

The real opportunity on YouTube is to get into the recommendation engine. YouTube, like Twitter, has a world of unique content from talented individuals. By finding talented individuals speaking about trends and their ideas of the future, the YouTube algorithm will send you even more compelling videos about the future. While you’ll need to independently judge the predictions contained in all of these videos, it is a great way to constantly find new viewpoints that can help you identify new trends. 

Newsletters

There are plenty of newsletters out there that can offer you interesting insights about current and future trends. With newsletters, you’ll want to adopt a similar strategy as you would to Twitter and YouTube. Here, you want to find interesting people and see if they have a newsletter. If they have a newsletter, don’t hesitate to subscribe. While you may not necessarily read every single email or issue, keeping up with these talented individuals can help you identify trends on the horizon. 

Besides individual newsletter writers, you can also follow more established publications that release regular newsletters. News outlets like Axios release great newsletters, and these newsletters can help you keep up with mainstream trends. Along with Axios, I would specifically recommend Inside.com. Inside.com has a whole bunch of newsletters that they curate. It is a great resource for everything from cryptocurrency news to business news. Substack is also another great resource. It lets creators make newsletters and then monetize them (or give them away for free). 

So What Do You Do Next?

All of the resources above can help you get a much better sense of current and ongoing trends. Like I mentioned above, you don’t need to pick and choose among these resources. You can frequently view all of them if you’d like. At the very least, I would recommend that you at least glance at them from time to time. By doing this, you may stumble upon something very interesting that you can then incorporate into your own business. 

Once you have pulled up these resources, you’ll naturally want to figure out which trends to pay attention to and which trends to ignore. Ultimately, you need to follow your best judgment here. Look at the trends in front of you and figure out what you think will be the emerging trend over the next few months. 

After identifying with that trend, go ahead and run with it. Feel free to experiment. For instance, make that trend some part of your business strategy. You can also do what we do at Dubb and create content around the trends that we are identifying. Whatever the case may be, make sure that you are taking action. Identifying trends solely for the sake of identifying trends isn’t enough. Instead, you need to do something with the information that you have gathered. Even if you are launching a small experiment or taking a small step in your company, emphasizing action will help you bring these trends to life.

Finally, there is just one caveat in this discussion. The biggest problem with finding trends on the Internet is that by the time you find them, they are likely on their way out. Sometimes, the trends that you see may have already played themselves out.

So in these cases, what do you do? I think one of the best things to do is create your own trend. It is the most important thing and the most difficult thing to do. Like identifying trends, there is no silver bullet on how to create your own trend. You can certainly try to combine different trends in order to make a new trend. However, this sort of approach often leads to a lot of dead ends.

Ultimately, I think that it’s important to be yourself and to be an avid observer of the world. In our day-to-day lives, it is all too easy to keep our heads down and focus on ourselves. We have too many things on our to-do lists and not enough time to focus on things outside of our schedules. That being said, try to pay closer attention to what is happening around you. Observe how people are behaving and speak with others about the problems that they want to be solved. By investing in this primary research, you’ll be that much closer to designing the next big trend.

Predicting the Future

Even though predicting the future can be extremely difficult, I hope to have shown you how to predict next year’s business trends. While it takes some focused and dedicated work, I’m confident that you have the tools to succeed.

At Dubb, we love thinking about current and future business trends. If you want to further discuss the suggestions above or share any business trends that you are viewing, don’t hesitate to contact us. We’d be happy to hear from you!