Twitter has recently updated its ‘Trending Topics’ algorithm. So, starting May 14th, your Twitter sidebar and homepage only lists the ‘latest’ and the ‘hottest’ topics on Twitter
What exactly is it?
Earlier, Twitter used to categorize something as a trending topic when the term was consistently popular. But, Twitter has now changed and ‘Trending Topics’ reflects keywords and categories that are currently ‘trending’ and not necessarily popular in the past. So this gives rise to any breaking news automatically becoming trending.
What is ‘Trending Topics’?
A Trending Topic is any keyword or groups of keywords which are very popular in terms of the number of tweets or re-tweets. So generally, small businesses introduce a hashtag for their respective activity and make sure all tweets carry the hashtag. This enables tweets related to your business to be consolidated and one click would ensure all tweets being listed. So, the main aim behind introducing a hashtag is to make it trending. If your hashtag gets listed on the Trending Topic sidebar, you a lot of visibility!
For example, a group of Tweeple had trouble with Café Coffee Day and introduced the hashtag #CCDsucks. The number of tweets with this hashtag increased massively and it became a featured Trending Topic. The visibility was so high that CCD had to sit up and take notice and combat the negative publicity.
What we think
It is quite interesting to note that with this change many of us have a chance of making a topic trending. You are not competing with past data, but just with the current tweets and topics. So, if you have a certain piece of news that you think is of grave importance to your customers and if your customers feel so too, then you stand a very good chance to become popular. Basically you can break right into the clutter and make your topic trendy
But, on the flip side, marketers now really need to work hard on maintaining their place on Twitter. Establishing a topic is not sufficient, now you need to re-work on your Twitter strategy. Until now, marketers have aimed at establishing a hashtag and making it trending. But this hashtag might not last long, so the entire campaign might have to be re-looked at. Probably the entire campaign can be broken down into several different interesting topics, each of which has the capacity to become popular.
Further Thoughts
Twitter also says that, “it’s compelling to know what the “most popular” topics are, and we will look to capture this in some way in the future.” Well if this is implemented as well, it will be a very interesting improvement and scope for marketing better on Twitter. It will give a greater flexibility to launch campaigns specific to Twitter.