Trending Topics Feature on Social Media Networks
A trending topic is a word, phrase or a topic that has been tagged or discussed at a greater rate than other tags. Either users’ efforts can help in making a particular topic popular or it could also be a particular news or event that became popular amongst people. With time, this feature has made an important place in the social media circle. Everyone wants to be a part of it as it helps in bringing them under a spotlight.
Twitter is the social media platform that introduced trending topics in 2010. When you login to Twitter, you can see them on the left hand side with hashtags. A lot of companies also run marketing campaigns, which help in bringing them under the trending topics. For example, if you’ll look at the top trending topics of today, you will see #sendmeoreo in the top ten trending topics. This is clearly an example of a good marketing strategy to build a brand name.
A lot of marketers use them to create content, which eventually help them in getting traffic. So, if you belong to real estate industry, you can look for the topics related to your industry and talk about them in your blog or article. But you also need to make sure that your post is well crafted and interesting enough to hold the attention of your readers. After that, you can tweet your post and ask your followers for retweets.
Google+ also rolled out this feature in 2011 by following Twitter’s footsteps with a list of 10 hottest trending topics. These topics are shown with the help of Google Trends and Hot searches. This makes it different from Twitter because there is a possibility that the topics which are popular on Twitter might not be as popular on Google. You can see them with the hashtags on the right panel and the icons next to each trend depicts if the post is becoming more or less popular.
Early this year, Facebook launched the trending topics feature. It is considered to be pretty late as compared to other social media portals but better late than never. The feature is called “Trending” and it will appear next to the News Feed. Again, it will show all the popular searches/topics that have been discussed by using their algorithm, designed to dig topics that have seen significant increase in popularity on Facebook.
Social media marketing covers multiple facets depending upon the kind of social media network you are using. But they all have few similar features like trending topics that could turn out to be a great help if used effectively. It is one way of helping you to discuss something, which is “trending” in your particular field of interest and giving you more exposure.
