Digital Media Buzz > Are Twitter’s Trending Topics All Talk, No Substance?

Are Twitter’s Trending Topics All Talk, No Substance?

By Rebecca Henely

As 2009 drew to a close, Twitter showcased one of its most recent site features – trending topics – by releasing the top 10 list of trending topics for the year on its blog.

Much buzz has circulated about the marketing and journalistic potential of trending topics, a service by the social networking website that began in April and tracks the most common phrases of its users’ tweets at any given time, but Pete Spande, SVP of sales and marketing at Federated Media, states he did not find the list, or trending topics themselves, very useful. “For me, the trending topic is a mixed bag. Often times, the trending topics don’t lead to much discovery,” says Spande, whose company connects marketers to online publishers.

The list, released by Abdur Chowhury, chief scientist at Twitter, gave the top 10 news events, people, movies, TV shows, sports teams, technology and hash tags (Internet memes circulating on Twitter that are marked by a “#” symbol before a word or a phrase mashed together). Overall, the most popular trending topic and news event was the June 2009 contested Iranian presidential election.

“In 2009, Twitter’s Trending Topics helped us understand what was happening around the world showing us that people everywhere can be united in concern around important events; excited about a new movie; or geek-out about a major new technology,” states Chowdhury in the posted blog on Twitter.

Yet Spande says most of the information about trending topics could be found from other sources. “Apple is the most talked about company. Michael Jackson was a popular celebrity topic this year…. All very straightforward,” he says.

Spande adds that while he believes Twitter is shaping the culture of the Internet, he is unsure of the role the trending topics themselves have in the conversation. “Much has been made about how Twitter influences the opening week for a movie and breaks news. In both of these cases, and many other cases, there are two distinct groups participating in a trending topic. There is the group of people adding to the conversation and the group that is sharing that conversation through retweets, @replies, etc. When Iran protests were dominating the Twitter trending topics, there were many more people sharing than influencing the conversation. In other cases, like Avatar’s release, there were hundreds of thousands 140-word movie reviews contributing to the conversation,” Spande says.

Rich Brooks, president of Flyte New Media, an Internet marketing and Web design company, also expressed skepticism of the idea of trending topics being useful, especially in marketing.

“I think it was a very cool thing that has mostly been overrun by spammers and irreverent and usually irrelevant memes,” Brooks says. “Occasionally I’ll find a breaking news story that way.”

When asked if he would recommend trying to get a business to use trending topics as a means of advertising, he says he would not. “There may have been a time that this was effective, but for most small businesses trying to ‘catch the wave’ of a trending topic [that] has very little import, and trying to start your own, can be insanely difficult,” Brooks says, adding that trending topics could be an indicator of customer satisfaction, but it should be treated as one of many.

“I wouldn’t bet my business on trending topics,” Brooks says. “Twitter, like the blogosphere before it, tends to be a bit of an echo chamber. It’s a very slim, technologically savvy audience, and not always representative of the nation, or the world, as a whole.”