Finding information about trending topics on social media can be a very important tool to get your brand to position itself above your competition. It will give you a better understanding of your audience and you can create interesting and relevant content.
Just a few years ago, keeping up with trending topics was a fairly straightforward task. It was enough to read the newspaper daily or watch the news on television. However, the explosion of new information channels makes it much more complex now. Fortunately, there are many methods to discover the most relevant trends on social media.
Why do social media trends matter?
Monitoring trends is important for any business. For marketers and community managers, you need to be able to join the conversations relevant to your industry at the right time to provide relevant information about trending topic
. They can even discover trends that mark the development of their products.
Trends on Twitter
Twitter is a fast-moving content network that changes minute by minute. On many occasions it has been the platform that has released important news, such as when a plane crashed in New York . It is also the place where less important stories are shared, like that afternoon when more than half a million people in England stopped working to watch a live stream of a puddle (and people passing by) on Periscope.
Trends on Twitter can be discovered in two ways. There is a free option called “Moments” available to everyone. It is a list of the most relevant stories at that particular moment, with a short explanation and some tweets from users who are talking about it. It usually focuses on the most important stories of the day.
Custom trends are available to those with a Twitter account and can be found on the left side of the page. By default, they display a custom selection of trends. An algorithm is used to determine how personalized the content is based on your location and what you follow.
You can easily change this and see trends for a certain location. Doing so can be useful for finding trends in specific markets or for doing local marketing.
Trends on Instagram
Instagram shows trends in real time. Trends are customized with an algorithm, which means that you might miss an important trend if you don’t follow the right people.
Trends on Facebook
On the right side of your screen you will find a specific selection of trends for you. The content that is displayed depends on your tastes, who you follow and all the data that Facebook has about you.
The stories are grouped into top trends, politics, science and technology, sports, and entertainment. This section recently caught the attention of the media when they realized something surprising: social networks are personalized.
The Wall Street Journal developed an interesting tool called Blue Feed, Red Feed . This shows a representation of the different stories that the algorithm can show. The graph cannot serve as a trend finder, nevertheless, it is a reminder that different trends on different platforms have different meanings to different people.
Given that 62% of adults in the United States consider social networks as their main source of news, this is increasingly important.
Searching for these topics on social media, rather than other platforms, is the easiest way to find conversations in real time. Before they are talked about anywhere else.
Facebook stands for connecting everyone in a global community, for bringing people together, for openly sharing ideas and culture across nations.
A major event in a community or outside of it is a powerful way to connect. Those who are interested in common topics can also connect through conversation.
Ultimately, Trending Topics serves as a way for people to stay on top of major events and meaningful conversations. Trending Topics is a feature we added in 2014 separate from a person’s News Feed to help people discover content that is both popular in the world and meaningful to them. Our algorithms determine which topics should be included in the product, not people. What is Trending Topics also has a team of experts who make sure that it is both high-quality and useful.
As part of its deep commitment to be a platform for all opinions, Trending Topics is governed by a set of guidelines meant to ensure best-in-class products. We have always wanted to provide a valuable service to our customers. It is clear from the guidelines that we have a set of checks and balances in place to make sure we cover the most important popular stories, regardless of where they fall on the ideological spectrum. No political origin is discriminated against by Facebook reviewers. Here are the guidelines we use.
What you need to know about how Trending Topics works:
Surfaced by algorithm
The algorithm that identifies potential Trending Topics detects topics that have recently spiked in popularity on Facebook (that is, topics that have a high volume of mentions and a sharp increase in mentions within a short amount of time). Additionally, the algorithm uses an RSS crawler to identify newsworthy events so that people are able to follow up on discussions on Facebook almost immediately.
Reviewed by the Trending Topics team
When the Trending Topics algorithm surfaces potential Trending Topics, members of the team examine them and perform the following:
The topic should relate to an actual news item (for example, #lunch can be talked about at lunch every day around the world, but will not become a trending topic).
You must describe trending topics in a way that is corroborated by more than a thousand media outlets who report on them. This media list can be found here.
- Apply a category label to the topic (ex. science, sports) so that you can customize the rankings and get suggestions grouped by category for the desktop version.
- You can check if the topic is national or global breaking news reported by more than 10 major media outlets. If it is, we give it an importance level, leading to a higher chance of being seen. They are listed in the guidelines.
Personalized
A list of Trending Topics is then customized for each user based on an algorithm that takes into account factors such as the significance of the topic, what pages the user likes, their locality (for example, home state sports news), and what’s trending across Facebook. There are different topics that people see at different times.
The Trending search results page
Whenever you click on an Emerging Topic, a search results page is displayed with links to all news sources and posts covering the topic. Similarly, posts and articles appear here based on an algorithm.
In addition to Trending, Facebook Search allows you to search for any topic that does not appear in the Trending suggestions.
Why was Trending Topics created?
Trending Topics allows users to see the most recent discussions on Facebook. This is an evolving project that continues to be updated. There are limited versions of the What is trending topics feature in the Facebook app right now, currently showing up in the right hand corner on desktop and the search box on the mobile app. The feature is primarily available to users of Facebook in English (there are some tests running in Spanish and Portuguese).
Is bias protected in the Trending Topics product?
Priority is given to topics whose popularity on Facebook and frequency makes them eligible for review – and does not consider perspective or politics. The second aspect of our algorithm is to remove noise that doesn’t pertain to recent newsworthy events without sacrificing relevance, as well as to identify the most important stories, wherever they may be Across the ideological spectrum, they are found. No political origin is discriminated against by Facebook reviewers.
The guidelines that govern our review:
Political perspectives should not be suppressed
Allow no preference to be given to one ideology over another
In addition, our review team audits work regularly to ensure adherence to guidelines. Violating the guidelines is a fireable offense.
