Reddit trends in 2025: How marketers can track what’s next

If you want to know what people will be talking about on LinkedIn, TikTok, or Instagram, look to what’s trending on Reddit. Every day, millions of people turn to the Reddosphere to share unfiltered opinions, ask peers and pros for advice, and search for new products and solutions that’ll solve their most pressing problems.

And now, a partnership with Google has made Reddit even more influential. Posts and comments from the platform help inform AI Overviews and are a regular feature on search results pages.

In this guide, we’ll show you how to filter this firehose of real-time, radically transparent insight to find the Reddit trends relevant to you and your audience.

We’ve also asked experienced Content Marketing Strategist Reggie Powell of The Results Phase and Abbie Mood, the Marketing Director of Velocity Advisory Group, for their best tips on mining Reddit for the next big idea.

What are Reddit trends and why do they matter?

Reddit trends are emerging topics, conversations, or cultural shifts that gain rapid attention and engagement across Reddit communities. They often serve as early indicators of what’s likely to spread to other platforms — like TikTok or X — and audiences.

These trends can literally move entire financial markets. In 2021, a group of investors on the subreddit r/wallstreetbets initiated a movement to boost GameStop’s stock price. The idea went viral, spreading to other social media platforms. Thousands of people bought the stock, driving its price up by 1,700% in a matter of days.

Source: CNBC

For Reginald Powell, the platform is his first stop to understand his audience. “Reddit has become my go-to source for learning about trends because of the accountability and community policing that’s unmatched by any other platform,” he said.

“This helps me better assess whether the juice is worth the squeeze when helping clients make social media marketing investments, as I can gauge what people actually believe and how the community is reacting.”

Why are trending topics on Reddit so influential?

First off, Reddit has a huge and diverse audience that’s still growing quickly. The platform has around 108 million daily active users. That’s roughly doubled in just the last few years.

Source: Statista

Second, Reddit is filled with highly active, niche communities (called subreddits) that passionately discuss their favorite topics.

Take r/beauty, for example. There are over 1.8 million people in that group asking questions and sharing ideas. A single post looking for advice can pull hundreds of votes and comments.

Source: Frostyarn on Reddit

And third, Reddit has a unique voting system that puts quality control in the hands of its users, not an algorithm. On Reddit, a comment can quickly be upvoted into virality or downvoted into oblivion.

Why should brands and marketers care about Reddit trends?

Reddit’s influence on buyers is powerful. The platform shows up in 97.5% of Google Search product review queries. And 42% of social media users say they trust recommendations found on Reddit more valuable than any other form of recommendation.

Plus, all of the authentic, unfiltered conversations happening on Reddit right now are a deep well of marketing intel delivered directly from the audiences you need to connect with.

Here are a few advantages you can get when you mine Reddit for insights:

• Spot emerging trends: When the pros in your target market start using a new technique, you’ll know before most and can become a trusted guide in teaching others.
• Track cultural shifts: Is crowd sentiment veering away from a pop-culture icon? Know it before mentioning them in your next Instagram Reel.
• Gain competitor intel: What do people love and hate about your competitors? Redditors will tell all.
• Understand consumer sentiment: Redditors give their opinions of product features without the veneer found on a brand’s websites. This feedback can guide everything from product positioning to new product development.

Source: RondaoDuckFish on Reddit

“Reddit is a free-for-all but in the best way,” Abbie Mood explained. “People are real and answer questions truthfully. There are, for sure, some dark corners of Reddit, but it can be really useful for gaining more insight into your audience and the problems they’re trying to solve.”

Where to find Reddit trends (and how to monitor them effectively)?

With so many people talking about so many things in so many subreddits, collecting useful insights from Reddit can quickly overwhelm.

The trick is knowing where to go to filter out the noise and get right to the good stuff you can use in your next social media campaign. Here are some of the best places to start.

r/popular and the Reddit Explore tab

The first place I’d peruse to get a feel for what’s trending on Reddit is r/popular. As the name suggests, it’s a feed full of content that’s getting a ton of upvotes and engagement from across the Reddit-sphere.

To take a peek at what’s popping, tap the “Popular” tab on your Reddit front page.

Source: Reddit r/popular

r/popular gives you a good “big picture” view of the types of content that are gaining steam. r/TrendingReddits has a similar vibe.

Now, we also want to find trends in specific niches. For that, head to the Explore tab (located below the Popular tab).

Here you’ll get a collection of popular communities organized by topic, location, and so on.

Source: Reddit Explore tab

Since Reddit’s algorithm is highly influenced by user votes, the hot topics and communities that pop up in your search are there because the audience wants them to be.

Subreddits tied to your industry or audience

Here’s where Reddit really shines for audience and trend research. It’s like one giant, well-organized, easily searchable database of focus groups. And all of those conversations are fuel for your content marketing strategies.

Are you an accountant, tax professional, or financial advisor? Head on over to r/PersonalFinance to learn what vexes your target audience (and turn those concerns into helpful social media posts).

Source: Illustrious_Bug_2355 on Reddit

Once you start digging, you’ll find all sorts of super-niche communities. Just in the beauty industry, there’s r/SkinCareAddiction, r/BeautyDiagrams, r/MakeupRehab, and dozens of others. Pop in, see what people say about a product, technique, or trend, and turn it into your next social campaign.

Reddit’s content filter

Reddit knows its users (and marketers!) want to know what the next big trend is. So it has built-in filters that help you find them.

Start at r/all (basically the front page of Reddit). Tap the dropdown menu at the top, and pick a filter like “Hot,” “New,” or “Rising.”

Source: r/all on Reddit

• Hot shows popular, recent posts.
• Top shows top posts with the highest upvote count (minus downvotes).
• Rising highlights newer posts that are starting to get some positive buzz.

Third-party tools for Reddit trend tracking

Tracking new trends on Reddit is…a lot! Luckily, there are tools like Talkwalker by Hootsuite that can collect, analyze, and visualize what’s going on in the world of subreddits for you.

Talkwalker has an API connection with Reddit, meaning it can scour the platform for mentions of your brand, products, or relevant topics to surface trends at scale.

Let’s say you work for Ford and want to know what and how Redditors are talking about your brand. Filter a search for your brand on Reddit in the Listening tab, and you’ll see these charts:

Look at that! There was a peak in brand mentions and sentiment at the beginning of August.

Now, take a look at the top themes leading to those positive vibes in your dashboard.

And bam! You have a list of topics you can dig into deeper for social content to ride the wave of good feels.

How can brands and marketers use Reddit trends in 2025?

So, what can you do with all this newfound Reddit knowledge? With a little creativity, you can use it to supercharge your content calendar, find market gaps for your products, keep tabs on your competitors, and a whole lot more!

Find new content angles and campaign ideas

Reddit is like your content crystal ball, telling you what’s about to be popular on other social media platforms. Use it to fill your calendar with new angles and ideas, or inform your Reddit ads, so you’re always one step ahead of the curve.

See a new meme in r/grilling? Post it to your cooking Instagram Reels. Notice a trend in people asking about a new 5k training technique? There’s your next series of chiropractor TikToks.

Source: Skylove64 on Reddit

“I use Reddit trends to identify questions that our target audience is asking and themes in their conversations,” Mood said. “I’ve then used those to drive content on both the website and social media, including FAQs, quizzes, attention-grabbing social media posts, etc.”

Listen for product feedback and unmet needs

This one can directly influence your business’s bottom line. People go to Reddit to find solutions to problems. Many times, there isn’t a good one. That’s where you learn that a new product, feature, or service will have an instant population of eager buyers.

Source: Practical_Action_438

A variation on this theme is to listen to what Redditors say directly about your product. What do they love and what do they think is missing? It’s a free focus group just waiting for you.

Competitor analysis

Flipping the script on the last use case, Reddit can tell you what people think about your competitors. Not only is this an opportunity to find gaps in service, it’s also an amazing way to fortify your differentiation and messaging.

Say you market a brand of mobile phones, and another maker just dropped their newest version. You want to know what early users think, so you can highlight what your models do better. Redditors will tell you.

Source: amsvibe on Reddit

Spot potential crises or reputation issues early

Remember our Ford example? In that instance, we saw a small spike of positive sentiment. But what if it was the other way ‘round and the Reddit trend was a swift switch to highly negative mentions of our brand?

Well, if we’re tracking those mentions through Reddit or Talkwalker, we’d get to the bottom of it before it became a full-blown social media crisis.

How to track and analyze Reddit trends over time

One of the best aspects of Reddit trends is how many ways you can easily track them from several different angles. From setting up keyword alerts to keeping tabs on the right influencers, we’ll look at how to have your thumb on the pulse of your Reddit audience.

Use keyword alerts and topic monitoring

Reddit recently launched Reddit Pro Trends — a free tool for organizations and businesses to stay on top of important activity in the platform.

Once you sign up for Reddit Pro, navigate to the Trends dashboard and add relevant keywords, such as your business name and related topics. You’ll see a graph that shows how your keywords are trending.

Scroll down the dashboard to see top keywords, conversations, and communities mentioning your target terms.

Talkwalker gives you similar information and a whole lot more. With your critical keywords loaded, you’ll see things like changes in engagement over time and when chatter peaks throughout the week.

Even better, you can set up alerts in Talkwalker for the most important brand terms, so you never miss a mention.

Ask AI for help

Mood shared an interesting method for quickly curating Reddit trends at scale. She enters this prompt in ChatGPT:

“What are the questions [target demographic] are asking the most frequently about [topic/service/pain point]? Look for them on social sites, forums, Reddit, Quora, and other places where [target demographic] ask questions. Find as many as possible. Then, categorize them and rank-stack them by frequency.”

And then she follows it up with this:

“Format the report with a table at the top summarizing your findings. Then, make each category a heading to be followed by a quick summary of what you found for that category and about a dozen bullets of direct quotes you found that represent that category.”

That leaves her with a neatly organized list of customer questions and quotes she can use as content topics or social media themes.

Follow key subreddits and influential Reddit users

To get the most out of Reddit trends, you’ll need to build a watchlist of the most influential users and subreddits.

Here’s a quick workflow to get started:

• Search for subreddits by topic: Type some topics into the query bar (or even search “Best subreddits for [topic]”) to see what comes up.
• Look for active communities: Pick subreddits with a large audience, lots of recent posts, and long comment threads.
• Spot influencers: As you review communities, look for repeat posters, click on their account, and see where, how, and how often they comment. Once you find your people, click the blue follow button in their profiles.

Pro tip 💡: Every Redditor’s profile contains some useful information you can use to evaluate the best people to follow. Check out their Karma score (a measure of their reputation based on upvotes), contributions, and the communities in which they’re active. Many will also have a little bio blurb.

Source: Noah Galuten on Reddit

These systems are why Reddit is so great at unearthing the raw collective consciousness of a community.

“From the UpVote/DownVote system and Reddit Karma to subreddit admins, Reddit’s social proof guardrails make it easier to filter through AI-generated content, bot traffic, and algorithmic gaming and understand the authenticity of engagement on the platform,” Powell told us.

Analyze upvotes, comments, and sentiment

Here’s where you can get really critical of trends to find the ones that are gaining traction fast. To do it, you’ll triangulate on three metrics:

• Upvotes: Look for recent conversations with lots of upvotes using some of the tactics we talked about (r/popular, search filters, etc.)
• Comments: Review for both quantity and quality of the comments. Discussions with side conversations, questions, and even a little controversy are great targets.
• Sentiment: Spot shifting tides of sentiment on your Hootsuite dashboard to locate topics trending in the positive direction (or even a negative one if you can spin it to your favor).

The unicorn trends you’re looking for will show an upward swing in all three categories.

Reddit trends to watch in 2025

Reddit trends aren’t just great ways to find new content angles and research competitors. They’ll also teach you what’s next in marketing and social media. Here are a few trending topics worth paying attention to.

1. AI-generated content

AI is evolving at an incredible rate. In marketing, few things have been more upended by technology than in how marketers and brands use it to generate content for social posts, blog articles, websites, and even emails.

On top of all these sudden shifts, there are multiple angles to stay on top of. The tools, use cases, prompts, and even ethics are all sources of conversation on Reddit. Look at this theme map from Talkwalker on AI-generated content.

Notice how most are neutral, but a few lean positive or negative. Those are some hot-button topics worth following on Reddit.

2. De-influencing

De-influencing is an emerging trend that pushes back on the over-hype of products some see as unnecessary. It reflects a shift toward authenticity and skepticism, especially among younger generations who are savvy to the tactics of influencers.

Source: lazlo_camp on Reddit

If influencers are an important piece of your social strategy, you’ll want to stay on top of this trend to make sure you’re brand isn’t being de-influenced.

Notice how candid commenters are in these threads. “This is very different from platforms like Facebook or TikTok, where users are followed by real-life connections, such as their family and friends,” Powell said. “People tend to be more measured and prone to “groupthink” when posting on a platform where people know their government name.”

3. Climate anxiety

Climate anxiety is the dread many feel due to the potential impacts of climate change. It’s a growing theme for discussions on Reddit.

Source: Search for “climate anxiety” on Reddit

While the topic is not directly related to marketing, it’s an example of a trend that may influence how you market your product. If you’re audience tends to be climate conscious, tracking this trend on Reddit will help you “read the room” and communicate in a way that feels authentic to their concerns.

What other big-picture topics do your audience think about? Those would also be significant trends to track.

4. Personal branding

Personal branding is all about how you present yourself — especially your professional self — to the world. A few years ago, it was a niche topic talked about by a few growth gurus. Now, personal branding is a popular point of discussion because it:

• Helps you get hired: Employers look at a candidate’s online activity to see how they share knowledge with the world.
• Helps you grow a business: People seek the authenticity of a human connecting with their audience over a faceless brand.
• Is evolving: A personal brand used to be for CEOs, and now pizza cooks and entry-level bankers are building their own.

There are many points of view on the topic of personal branding, including some backlash on how it’s currently done.

Source: zsomtor on Reddit

All of this adds up to a Reddit trend worth following, especially for marketers and branding experts.

Reddit trends FAQ

How do I see what’s trending on Reddit?

To see what’s trending on Reddit, look at r/popular on Reddit itself, or use a third-party social listening tool like Talkwaker by Hootsuite to track emerging trends and set alerts to stay on top of them.

What are the most popular subreddits for brands to follow?

The most popular subreddits for brands to follow depend on each brand’s audience and products. Brands should use the search bar on Reddit to locate active communities that regularly discuss relevant topics.

Can brands post on Reddit?

Yes, brands can, and should, post on Reddit! It’s essential to go into it with a mindset to be helpful and engaging, not salesy. Redditors will quickly downvote any overt attempt to sell.

How do I track Reddit trends across platforms?

The easiest way to track Reddit trends across platforms is with a third-party tool like Talkwalker by Hootsuite. With solutions like this, you can catch trends early in their growth, see how they spread from Reddit to other social platforms, and stay ahead of them as they naturally evolve.

Is Reddit a good place for marketing research?

Reddit is one of the best platforms for marketing research. Its user voting system and niche communities give marketers access to free, unfiltered focus groups.

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