Trending is an area on Twitter and Facebook that shows topics that have generated a lot of interest on the site. These trends are determined by the volume of people searching for particular words or phrases and are often influenced by current events.
While some of the trends that show up are silly and frivolous, others can have serious implications. For example, if a political topic or hashtag catches on, it can bring more attention to the issue and help it rise up the ranks of public opinion. Trending is a powerful tool that can be used by both businesses and individuals, and it’s important to understand how it works before you use it for your marketing or advocacy campaigns.
In order for a trend to appear on Twitter, there must be a significant increase in search volume for a specific term over a relatively short period of time. A trend is then presented as a popular topic on the site’s home page or in the sidebar of individual accounts. Twitter has modified its algorithms in the past to try to prevent abuse of the feature, but some tactics still work. Trends are also listed by location, with the ability to toggle the results for a specific city or country.
Using the trends section on Twitter’s website, you can see what’s currently popular in your geographic area. If you’re not seeing the trends that are relevant to your community, it may be helpful to change your location in the upper right corner of the trends menu. Twitter users can also choose to change their preferred location on desktop or mobile.
You can also get a good idea of what people are interested in by visiting the Google Trends website. The homepage shows several data visualizations of trends, including an interesting “interest over time” graph that shows search volume relative to other terms for a given period. There are also links to trending searches on YouTube, Image Search and News. You can also select a different time frame for the graph and click to see a specific search category.
The YouTube trends page is especially useful, as it can be hard to gauge what’s popular in the video-sharing platform from its For You recommendations. The site also has a neat Year in Search archive that provides summaries of the most popular searches for particular years.
You can also find trends on other Google sites, such as Image Search, News and Shopping. Some of these sites even offer a tool that allows you to create your own trending list based on keywords or locations. If you’re a journalist, you can use this feature to get a sense of what stories are getting the most attention in your region or industry. In addition, many of these sites have their own tools for promoting and measuring the success of social media content. For example, on TikTok, you can promote your story in a variety of ways, such as with a spark or pangle ad that appears on the for you page, or with a carousel ad that runs across a user’s feed.