Identifying emerging trends to gain a competitive edge

Identifying emerging trends early gives organizations a competitive edge to anticipate shifts in technology, consumer behavior, and market dynamics—before they become mainstream. This foresight allows proactive strategic decisions in product development, innovation, marketing, and investment. By tagging and tracking relevant trends, companies can build a 360° view of their landscape, connecting insights across R&D, strategy, and competitive intelligence. In fast-moving industries, missing an early signal can mean falling behind. With Feedly’s Emerging Trends Dashboard, organizations can stay alert to weak signals that grow into tomorrow’s big changes.

Our proprietary AI scans millions of articles to surface trends in near real-time and filter out noise. Trends are included in our dashboards, once they reach a minimum visibility threshold, meaning, the trend has appeared across a number of publications over a specific timeframe. To ensure we only include actionable trends, we filter out seasonal events like "Black Friday", specific product launches, events like conferences or sporting event, and one-off stories like elections. Now with Custom Filters, you can quickly navigate to the trends most important to you.

This blog will guide you in setting up and refining your dashboard to surface the trends most relevant trends.

Create a new dashboard

When creating a new dashboard, start by selecting the broadest categorization of your research interest to discover a high volume of trends, like industries, technologies, sustainability topics, generations, consumer trends, or other broad topics. For example, you can start with an industry such as the energy industry.

Refine and dive deeper with a Custom Filter

If you would rather dive deeper into a specific subsection of your dashboard, you can do so with a Custom Filter. For instance, you can create a Custom Filter using your own words to specify the desired trends you wish to see. Pro Tip: This works best for dashboards about broad industries or topics. For example, an energy industry focused dashboard can be further refined to only surface nuclear power related trends by using the Custom Filter.

Additional refinement options

In addition to the refinements with the Custom Filter, you can also use the Growth, Time Range, and Size filters to further narrow down the list of trends.

• Time Range: The time range filter refers to the amount of time a specific trend has qualified by our definition and the filters available are last 30 days, 3 months, 6 months, and 12 months.
• Growth: The growth filter refers to the percentage increase in the number of times that specific trend has been mentioned and is categorized as “Growing, Surging, and Exploding”
• Size: The size filter refers to the number of articles and sources mentioning the trend, categorized as Niche, Known, and Mainstream.