Social Trends
In social media vocabulary, a ‘Trend’ is the hottest emerging topic of discussion that is concerning mostly to the local majority of followers.
In Twitter for instance, trends are determined by an algorithm and bespoken to the people you follow according to your geographical location.
Twitter trends are about the topics that immediately popular and not those, which have been popular for a while or on a daily basis.
Hash tags
In Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites you can use the ‘hash tag’ (#) before a phrase or word. By doing so, you will transform the word into a keyword can be used to organise messages on a social network. This then facilitates the searching and grouping of messages with given hashtags.
Facebook has recently inserted the use of Hash tags into their platform. This represents a significant step towards business in real time.
Another advantage of this tool is the fact of allowing networking users to make their thoughts to become viral without the help of friends. In other words, thanks to hash tags, not only your friends will see your posts and Facebook status, but very likely thousands or millions of others with do so too.
Trend Hunter’s Tools
Some of the tools you can use to research latest trends are:
- Twitter which has its own tool to identify trends,
- Google Trends (http://www.google.co.uk/trends/hottrends),
- Hastags.org (http://www.hashtags.org/)
In my [not so] humble opinion, If you want to drive more traffic to your website, create or enhance brand awareness, don’t take trends for granted. On the contrary, use them to avoid finding yourself swimming against the tide of the public interest and to take advantage of the people’s curiosity to be known.