What is a Trending Topic (TT)

The Trending topics are the most used keywords in a specific term on Twitter. They are the keywords of fashion (called hashtags on Twitter), what is most talked about in this social network. A Trending Topic is identified with a # that precedes one or several specific terms together, since Twitter only identifies a set of linked letters as a hashtag . Normally a trending topic is an identification on Twitter for current issues, specific events, etc; although they are also words that at a given moment are detected as very named. In this way, if a topic has become unexpectedly popular, perhaps we can discover that something has happened. Keep reading to find out how these TT begin and develop .

Steps to follow:

one

According to a study by the Social Computing Research group, the algorithm that selects Trending Topics takes into account the scope of each tweet more than the number of times a topic is mentioned or the person sending it, that is, 31% of they are the result of retweets, messages that pass from one user profile to another.

two

According to the study, 22 users were the authors of messages with the maximum number of referrals in the TTs and 72% of these users belong to media such as CNN, The New York Times, The Telegraph, BBC or El País. However, the horizontal diffusion is much more important than the vertical and the tweets of people with many followers have little influence. The really important thing is that the stories are forwarded by users until they become TTs.

3

For journalism, the Trending Topics are a very effective tool, since it allows us to know news events that have reached a high popularity index. This is the case, for example, of awards ceremonies such as Grammy or Goya, elections, football matches, etc.

4

At other times, it may simply happen that public figures who convert some statement into something media and Twitter users begin to talk about it massively. Likewise, it is interesting to look at it to better understand the news in the network.

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