Twitter’s Trending feature showcases hashtag-driven topics that are popular among its community at a given time. Twitter’s algorithms determine trends by analyzing hashtag use, popularity over time and location. Trending topics can be influenced by current events, cultural and other discussions, viral content, or even online campaigns and challenges. Trends are generally localized to a specific community, but can also impact people worldwide.
To make a hashtag trend on Twitter, users need to be using it and other people need to retweet the topic in order to get it to climb up the list. Trends are characterized by a blue “trending” label and are clickable, which leads to a list of Tweets with that tag from around the world.
A hashtag’s trendiness is determined by the number of times it is used per hour, day or week. It can be influenced by the volume of Twitter users talking about it, whether it is being used to share news, discuss a popular movie or show, or if it is being used in the context of a specific social media campaign. Twitter’s algorithms are complex, and factors such as time of day, location and who one follows can influence what appears in Trending.
Unlike Facebook’s Trending, which displays content that is tailored to an individual user based on the pages they like or follow and their location, YouTube’s Trending tab focuses on real-time topics that are of interest to its viewers. The algorithm considers factors such as the number of views a video receives, how many engagements it gets, and its performance in terms of its view counts over time, in addition to how much activity it generates on YouTube’s Explore page.
For marketers, understanding how to identify and capitalize on trends can be an opportunity to connect with people at a personal level, drive traffic to their websites, and generate brand awareness. It can be difficult to find the right timing, however, as a trend can ebb and flow quickly.
A downward trend is an indication that the market may be losing steam, which can lead to a sell-off by traders who are either looking to minimize losses or take profit from the price decline. The reverse of this is an upward trend, which could indicate that the market may be picking up momentum and be poised to make a strong move.
SparkToro Trending is an online tool that analyzes Twitter’s trends and delivers a curated list of the most shared trending topics by Web marketers on the platform. While it is free for anyone to use, it can be difficult to sift through the trends and identify what is actually being talked about by real Twitter users. As a result, it can be difficult to determine the most valuable trends for marketing purposes. However, if you can filter out the noise, there is potential to uncover some hidden gems that will be useful for your business.