First, Yahoo and Bing announced top 2010 search trends. Then last week, Google's zeitgeist offered insight on major searches for the year. Now, Twitter has announced the biggest trends among the 25 billion Tweets sent in 2010, and social and search marketers might glean insight on the topics that caught clicks within the social sphere.
Twitter explained in an earlier blog post that its algorithm keeps track of the volume of terms mentioned to determine leading topics as they are tweeted, identifying emerging trends even before they are recognized as popular. "The Trends list is designed to help people discover the 'most breaking' breaking news from across the world, in real-time," the blog says.
Marketers across industries might find there are topics relevant to their businesses that made the list. Twitter's 2010 Trends breaks down Tweets according to "Movies," "Technology," "People" and more. Plus, the "News Events" category could offer insight on trending topics that are related to a broad range of companies.
The biggest trend for the year was the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, outranking celeb sensation Justin Bieber and Apple's iPad. With this in mind, marketers might consider that hard news topics are always trending.
As Brafton reported earlier this year, journalistic content stays ahead of the trends and hard news is proven to produce revenue for sites. Brands may want to plan their content marketing campaigns for 2011 accordingly.
