Google Trends allows you to see what topics are trending online and over time. You can search specific terms to see their popularity and how it changes. For example, searching "LinkedIn" shows it dips at the end of each year when people are less active, while "MySpace" continues to lose popularity. Comparing "Facebook" in the US versus China shows it declining in the US but interest remaining in China. Changing the time frame for "Facebook" to 2004-present provides a clearer view of its product lifecycle. Google Trends also identifies related "Break out" searches seeing sudden increases, like "Facebook Espanol" rising due to new interest in its digital currency expansion in Spain.

1. How To Use Google
TRENDS

2. https://www.google.com/trends/
Open Google Trends:1.

3. • Google Trends will automatically show you what’s trending online.

5. • You can tailor which field you’re interested in, so that Google will only
show you what’s trending in that field.

8. • You can also search for a particular term to see how that is trending
over time in Google searches.
• Let’s look at the search term ‘LinkedIn’.

10. • One thing we start to notice is seasonality.
• At the end of every year, there’s a dip in popularity – because most
people aren’t working and aren’t checking LinkedIn.
• You can hover over any point of the trend line to get an exact date.

11. • You can also compare two search terms.
• Let’s add the search term ‘Myspace’

13. • If you add ‘MySpace’ to the search, you can see that it continues (all
these years after its failure) to lose traffic.
• LinkedIn, on the other hand, has increasing traffic.

14. • Now let’s take a look at ‘Facebook’

16. • We can see that Facebook is in a clear but slow decline.

17. • Unless we change the location to China, instead of the USA.

19. • China seems to be keeping its interest in Facebook, despite the fact
that it’s not an available service there yet.

20. • Let’s go back to the USA.
• But let’s change the time frame. Instead of the last 4 years, let’s
change that to since 2004 (Google’s data limit).

22. • Now we get a much, much clearer view of Facebook’s popularity.
• Facebook is in the decline phase of its product life cycle.

25. • Google Trends also shows us which search terms are ‘Break outs’ –
which means they’ve had a sudden burst in searches.
• Google will show you break-outs related to you chosen search term.
• Let check the break-outs for Facebook.

27. • ‘Facebook Espanol’ is breaking-out. Why?
• If we do a quick Google Search under News, we find that Facebook is
moving into the digital currency space in Spain.
• That news it generating interest, and an increase in search.

29. • Lastly: You can see the popularity of a search by location, which can
be highly useful for marketers looking to expand a product.
• It distributes demand over a world map.

32. • Google Trends – it’s a powerful tool, well worth using.