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Popular conversation
topics on Twitter are known as ‘trends’ and it allows users to tweet why the
topic is important or interesting to them. The trend may be about a breaking
news story or a fun topic to engage twitter users. It is also useful when in
content development in that you can create content relevant to a hashtag,
creating more traffic to your site/blog. It also allows a person to gauge the
opinions or ideas from people on a topic. People however can get banned from
the site if they use vulgar language, abuse the system or spam. A topic becomes
a trend after polling of repeated hashtags found on tweets is done. The trend
status is also determined by the time tweeted and volume of tweets that contain
a certain hashtag.
The topics are usually
around what is currently being discussed most rather than the overall popular
topics from the community. You can view both international and regional tweets
and this allows users to access current information creating a buzz. Media stations
sometimes rely on trends since they are often times formed before they reach
newsrooms. There are currently more that 500 million tweets generated per day
and trends allow news, media and advertising industries to tailor their content
to their target audience.
Twitter’s trends
algorithm, though not released to the public, is what determines a trend and
not a person. Though they have been accused of not letting more deserving
trends get on the list or even censoring possible trends, they maintain that
the trend algorithm is what interprets the data and determines if a topic will
become a trend. According to their support page when they rolled out the
Twitter algorithm, “The new algorithm
identifies topics that are immediately popular, rather than topics that have
been popular for a while or on a daily basis, to help people discover the ‘most
breaking’ breaking news from across the world” This was so as to
capture the most interesting topics taking place on Twitter.
The issue however with the
algorithm is that searching a topic is useless. Google adds weight to a topic
depending on how many users have searched it and where they go next. With Twitter,
the constant changing of topics then makes it difficult to apply relevance to a
particular topic or hashtag. You often find that what makes the trending list
is not particularly what people are interested in. There has however been a new
and more accurate algorithm put in place that analyzes the general pattern of tweets
in a given topic in about 90 minutes sooner than the Twitter algorithm.
This new innovation allows users
to break news before media stations air it. For many Kenyans, especially given
recent events, trends have been how many people have gain access to breaking
news wherever they are.
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