Twitter Topic Trends

By: Monika Doshi

Overview• Objective• Twitter Trends• What makes a trend.. Trend• Importance of twitter trends• How twitter trend algorithm works• Issue with twitter’s algorithm• New developments• Sources• Closing

Objective

A brief on twitter trends

Twitter Trends

• Twitter trends are automatically generated by an algorithm that attempts to identify topics that is being talked more right now than they were previously.

• There is a trend list which is designed to help people discover the most “breaking news” from across the globe in real time.

• The trend list captures the hottest emerging topics and not just the most popular.

What makes a trend.. Trend

• Twitter users now send more than 95 million tweets a day on just about any topic.

• Twitter tracks the volume of trends mentioned on twitter on an ongoing basis.

• Topics get on the trend list only when the volume of tweets for that topic increases drastically at a moment.

• Sometimes a topic does not trend if the velocity of the conversations for it does not increase enough.

Importance of twitter trends

• Important tool for anyone working in journalism or content creation, as they get the access to the latest topics under public discussions which are critical in these fields.

• Get a sense of reactions, ideas and opinions for the topics trending.

• Twitter’s trend list provides helpful insights to content creators by giving ideas for popular topics that people are currently talking about and searching for.

How twitter’s trends algorithm works

• Twitter determines its trending topics through its website’s algorithm.

• Data is collected by the algorithm and then the algorithm interprets the data to determine whether the topic should be in the trend list or not.

• It draws from a burst of hashtags and quick increases in volume for a particular topic, rather than a topic that remains popular for an extended period of time.

• Twitter continues to refine its algorithm to better determine the most recent talking points in their community

Issues with twitter’s algorithm

• Difficulty to apply weight and relevancy to a particular topic or hashtag. This makes twitter search features fairly useless.

• Lot less of customization of search results is possible as there barely any time for converting raw data for a topic or hashtag.

New Developments

• Devravrat Shah, an associate professor at MIT, along with his design team, announced a new algorithm for twitter.

• They claimed that it can determine trending topics with 95% accuracy, an average of 90 minutes before the topics trend with twitter’s algorithm.

• It relies more heavily on statistical patterns in data.

• If algorithm detects a familiar pattern in tweets on a topic, the topic will be more likely to trend.

Current twitter trends in India

Sources

• Blog.twitter.com

• Ignitesocialmedia.com