How to Find Trending Products on TikTok

Finding a product that sells itself is the dream, and right now, TikTok is the single best place to find one. The app’s lightning-fast trend cycles turn niche gadgets and clever solutions into viral must-haves overnight, creating massive opportunities for sharp entrepreneurs. This guide will show you exactly how to use TikTok as a powerful product research tool, moving beyond passive scrolling to actively uncover items your customers will love. We'll cover everything from training the algorithm to spot trends for you to the specific hashtags and search tactics that reveal winning products before they go mainstream.

Start with Your For You Page: The Ultimate Research Tool

Your For You Page (FYP) is more than just an entertainment feed, with the right approach, it becomes a personalized trend-spotting machine. The algorithm is designed to show you more of what you engage with. Your job is to teach it that you're interested in innovative products, small business finds, and consumer trends. Simply scrolling won't cut it. You need to be methodical.

Create a "Product Research" Account

The first step is to quarantine your search. Don't use your personal TikTok account, which is likely trained on cat videos, comedy skits, or whatever your personal interests are. Instead, create a brand new account dedicated solely to product discovery.

Here’s how to effectively train its algorithm:

• Follow the right accounts: Start by following accounts in niches you’re interested in. Look for product reviewers, "deal" accounts, small business owners who share their products, and creators who do "unboxing" or "testing out viral products" videos.
• Engage with relevant content: When you see a video featuring an interesting product, don't just watch it. Like it. Save it to a collection titled "Product Ideas." Read through the comments. If a video demonstrates a cool gadget or a life-improving item, watch it all the way through, maybe even twice. This signals intense interest to the algorithm.
• Ignore irrelevant content: Just as important is what you don't engage with. If a dance trend or a meme pops up in your feed, scroll past it immediately. The goal is to purify your FYP until it’s a non-stop stream of product-focused videos.

Within a few days of active, focused engagement, you'll be amazed at how smart your FYP becomes. The algorithm will start serving you a curated feed of potential bestsellers before they hit the masses.

The Hashtag Hunt: Uncovering Product Gold

Hashtags are the lifeblood of TikTok discovery. They aren't just for discovery, they're digital aisles where communities gather to share, review, and rave about products. By strategically navigating these hashtags, you can tap directly into consumer demand and see what people are genuinely excited about buying.

Key Hashtags Every Product Researcher Should Follow

Certain hashtags are magnets for viral products. Think of them as your primary research folders. Start by exploring and following these core tags:

• #tiktokmademebuyit: This is the holy grail. It's a massive, self-sustaining ecosystem of users showing off products they were influenced to buy from the app. Pay close attention to items that appear repeatedly from different creators.
• #amazonfinds: Users love sharing unique and surprisingly useful products they find on Amazon. This hashtag is perfect for identifying products with a readily available (and dropship-friendly) supply chain.
• #[Niche]finds: Get specific. Substitute "[Niche]" for whatever you're interested in. Examples include #cleaningfinds, #kitchenfinds, #beautyfinds, #techgadgets, or #caraccessories. This helps you narrow your focus and become an expert in a specific category.
• #productreview: This gives you unfiltered feedback. See what an average person - not just a paid influencer - thinks of a product after they've purchased it. Note the pros and cons they mention, this is valuable information for marketing angles.

Other powerful hashtags to explore include #coolgadgets, #viralproducts, #founditonamazon, and #oddlysatisfying (which often features products with visually appealing functions, like cleaning tools or organizers).

How to Analyze Videos for Potential

Once you're browsing these hashtags, you need to know what to look for. Not all product videos are created equal. You’re looking for signs of genuine, organic traction.

Metrics to Watch:

• High Engagement Rate: Look beyond just views. A video with 500,000 views but only 5,000 likes is less impressive than one with 200,000 views but 50,000 likes and thousands of shares. Look for high ratios of likes, comments, shares, and especially saves. Saves indicate very strong purchase intent.
• Explosive Comments Section: The comments are where you strike gold. Are people asking, "Where can I get this?" or "Link, please!"? Are others tagging friends saying, "We need this!"? This is real-time validation that the product resonates with an audience.
• "Regular People" Reviews: A video by a mega-influencer is one thing, but when you see a product popping up in dozens of videos from everyday users with smaller followings, you know the trend is real and has crossed into organic territory.

Advanced Tactics for Staying Ahead of the Curve

Once you’ve mastered the basics of algorithm training and hashtag research, you can use more sophisticated methods to find products before they become saturated. These tactics involve looking where others don't.

Become a Comment Section Detective

The comment section isn't just for validation, it's a discovery tool in itself. Often, the main focus of a viral video isn't the product that captures everyone's attention. For example: in a popular "get ready with me" (GRWM) video, people might become obsessed with the cool LED alarm clock in the background or the unique organizer on the creator's vanity.

Scroll through the comments on popular lifestyle, home organization, or decor videos. Look for repeated questions about a seemingly random background item. A user asking "Where did you get that lamp?" might be a one-off. Fifty people asking the same thing is a trend waiting to happen.

Leverage TikTok’s Powerful Search Bar

Don't just use the TikTok search bar for hashtags. Use it the way you would Google, but with a more conversational approach. Search for phrases that real people would use to find solutions.

Try searching for phrases like:

• "Things you didn't know you needed"
• "Amazon car essentials"
• "Coolest kitchen gadgets"
• "Home office upgrades"

When you get the search results, don’t just look at the "Top" videos. Use the filters to sort by "Most Liked" or videos from "This Week" to see what's currently gaining traction. A key indicator of a burgeoning trend is a video with a significantly higher view count than the creator’s follower count, showing that the content has broken out to a wider audience.

Follow Accounts That Spot Trends for You

Some TikTok accounts are dedicated entirely to testing and showcasing new products. The creators behind them are essentially professional trend hunters. Finding and following a handful of these accounts is like having a team of researchers feeding you ideas.

Look for creators who don’t just show the product but also test it rigorously or integrate it into their daily lives. Their authentic reactions and reviews can give you deeper insight into a product's appeal and its likely audience.

The Final Step: Validating Your Product Outside of TikTok

Finding a product that’s going viral on TikTok is an amazing first step, but it’s not the end of the research process. The TikTok ecosystem can be a hype bubble. Before you invest time and money into building a store and running ads, you need to validate the trend on other platforms to see if it has real-world legs.

Check Google Trends

Head over to Google Trends and type in the product name or related keywords. Are people searching for it on Google? Is the search interest trending upwards over the last 30 or 90 days? A rising graph on Google Trends provides strong evidence that the interest is spilling over from TikTok into the wider internet, indicating more sustained demand.

Explore Amazon’s Best-Seller Lists

Amazon is a goldmine for validation. Check lists like "Movers & Shakers," which shows the biggest gainers in sales rank over the last 24 hours. See if your product, or a similar version of it, is climbing the ranks in its category. See how many reviews it has and what customers are saying. High velocity on Amazon confirms there is a broad market of buyers for the item.

Monitor Competitor Ads

Check the Facebook Ad Library to see if other brands have already started running ads for the product. While seeing a lot of competition can be intimidating, a little competition is actually a good thing. It validates that other savvy marketers believe the product has enough demand to be profitable. Pay attention to the angles and creatives they’re using in their ads - it can give you ideas for your own marketing campaigns.

Final Thoughts

Finding a trending product on TikTok is a repeatable skill, not a stroke of luck. By systematically training your FYP, hunting down revealing hashtags, analyzing audience engagement, and validating your findings off-platform, you can consistently uncover what consumers want to buy right now.

Once you’ve found that perfect viral product, the work of marketing it begins. Creating and consistently posting engaging short-form videos across TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts is a giant challenge. To manage all that content without getting burnt out, we built Postbase, our own visual calendar and scheduling tool designed for the video-first reality of social media today. It lets us plan and schedule all our video content from one place, ensuring our posts go live reliably so we can focus on finding the next big thing.