How to make a trending topic?

A trending topic is most social media terms used (it is almost recursive by itself). It is related to internet interactions of users in media world that reflect all that is happening in real world. There are many reasons why we want to know what current trend is.

For example, market evaluation to position a product, behavior statistics or simply to find out what is sounding with major impact all around the world. Whatever the reason be, it is important to know it. In this article, we will address the topic of how to get a trending topic on the worldwide web?

What is a trending topic?

A trending topic is a moment subject matter on one or more social media platforms; understanding by social media platforms all those sites, applications and any technology that provides ways to share information such as Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, etc. It is not just related to events or news of interest, but also users, brands, and everything that is making good enough noise all around the globe to cause everybody is talking about it, in just one word: “popularity”.

Twitter was first introducing trending topic terms by using hashtags, that is a tag preceded by a hash symbol (#). What initially was a classification of most used labels ended up becoming a binnacle of most talked about topics. The great impact trending topics have in the press has caused this term to also be used to refer to a topic of great interest, whether or not it is being commented on the social network.

A trending topic is determined by each social media platform algorithms, most of them take into consideration appearance quantity over the internet, followers, likes, or searches that have or any time-dependent user behavior, among others.

Why should we be aware of trends?

There are many reasons why we want to know what the current trend is. Monitoring trends is important for any business like marketing, press, news, politics, and so on. In the case of marketers and community managers, they need to be able to join relevant conversations with the industry at right time, to bring relevant information. They can even discover trends that mark product development. 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.

Finding trends on social media will give us a better understanding of the audience are considering interesting and relevant content. Growth from the hand of an audience is a simple but important measure of structural and emerging changes that allows us to be one step ahead of the rest of the people.

How to make a trending topic?

Each social media has its own option to search for trending topics, which makes it much more complex to find the matter of the day. However, several sites collect and get trends on many social platforms to give us a big picture of what is happening and relevant all over the internet. Following, we will be talking about some of them.

Google Trends

Google Trends is a Google web service that allows monitoring search-related trends in a wide range of categories. It provides a graph of searching keywords through time and locations. Google also provides another related tool called Google Insights for Search.

BuzzFeed

BuzzFeed is a website that provides a global idea of what is happening in popular culture, social news, and entertainment.

Reddit

Reddit is a “front page” platform dedicated to trending stories of what is top in popular culture with votes that help get topics to the home page; basically, it has its own method to “trend“ trending topics.

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a tool that gives us the ability to search for any topic and then filter by date range offering another option to discover popular and trending content, influencers, and backlinks. In BuzzSumo trending stories are organized into different categories and show a rating so we can identify which ones are being shared the most across a variety of social media channels.

NowRelevant

NowRelevant is a search engine that shows everything related to a subject that has been mentioned on the internet in the last two weeks; it provides a slider where can choose it how many days back in time to search.

Radian6

Radian6 is a social tool that allows to listen, engage and get insights into demographics and trends, among others. Now, it is a Salesforce Marketing Cloud component.

Brandwatch Analytics

Brandwatch Analytics permits the discovery of trending topics meaning that can be much more specific about the type of content to find.

Brandwatch Audiences

Brandwatch Audiences, let us find topics on social platforms, but within a previously defined audience.

Now let’s find out what is happening

Now that we know how to be attentive to what happens in the world from a singular point and in a simpler way, we have to consider that it is possible trends that appear to us are not the same as those that appear to the person next to us. Another factor that can alter trends that appear is according to users we follow or our interests.

Also, do not forget that there is no single or best trend detection algorithm, but depending on our needs or our objectives we can use one of them. By identifying trending behavior, we can stay informed about current events, emerging, and even we can model future ones. Trends in social data not only reflect real-world events but also drive offline behavior by telling us about what is important to people.

Let’s discover and emerge!