Twitter has always been ahead of the curve when it comes to catering to the audience’s sentiments.
The platform’s features are designed specifically to entertain interesting conversations. The feature at the top of this list is the trends feature. The entire Explore page ensures that users are up to date with the trends and relevant topics globally, locally and in their industry.
In this piece, we’ll explore how to create tweets based on the principles of social listening, using the trends feature.
- What are trends?
- Types of trends
- How to find trending content on Twitter
- How to create trending content
- Guidelines to follow when creating these trends
What are trends?
A topic starts trending when there’s massive interest in and conversations around it. On Twitter, topics trend in real time and might have either a short-term running period of about a few hours, or a long-term one of 24 to 48 hours.
The majority of these trends are specific to each user’s account and timeline. They are determined through an algorithm based on factors such as who a user follows, their interests, and their location.
Twitter will show the trends to users and the most relevant conversations at the moment for users to enjoy or participate in with their opinions.
Additionally, hashtags are commonly added to tweets to signify their relevance to a topic. However, a topic can trend without one.
Types of trends
Twitter trending topic
This is a topic driven by the interest of the crowd at a given moment in time. Twitter takes it to be something that can affect people in general and declares it as a trend.
Being addressed by truckloads of people is generally the most prevalent criterion used to fill up the Twitter trending topics section. This kind of topic trends as a result of people driving up the conversation by talking about it or an event/situation that makes people talk about it.
Real-time trends
These are popular subjects in a particular period of time and in your location. Twitter uses an algorithm to determine these trends. At a particular time, you will see only real-time trends – not the ones which were well-known a while ago but the ones that are relevant right now.
Localized trends
Twitter makes sure to find out the things that are popular in your city and shows you what is relevant and what might be important to you based on where you are. It might be an event happening in your city or a situation that affects the people residing in your area.
Customized trends
These tweets are catered according to a situation that is common amongst your mutuals and community on the Twitter timeline. These trends are also modified by the kind of content you post, the tweets that you interact with and the hashtags that you search for.
How to find trending content on Twitter
Finding trending content on Twitter hinges on the Explore page and its features.
Trends for you
This category is a feature that shows users the topics trending on their account according to who they follow and the timeline they’ve curated.
Location
You also have the opportunity to check what is currently trending by location, whether that’s your city or the entire global Twitter community, by setting geographical preferences.
Personalization
For the best Twitter experience, you need to personalize your trend preferences. Twitter now lets you personalize the trending topics you see based on a few factors.
To make these personalizations, navigate to your Trends page by clicking the gear icon at the top, next to the search bar.
From this page, you can tailor your preferences to reflect the kind of trends you want to see on your feed. For Twitter to do this accurately, you also need to give it data to work with. This means following accounts, interacting with posts about your niche, industry or interest, and being active enough on the platform so that it begins to recognize more of your interests.
What’s happening
This section includes popular topics and a short summary of current and real-time events and headlines affiliated with your account’s tweets and the general Twitter timeline.
Twitter analytics
The more you tweet, the more data the platform collects. This is a great avenue to experiment with trending topics and observe your audience’s sentiment and what they lean towards.
Use the analytics dashboard to learn what times work best for sharing content, what topics your followers care about, or if you can identify any specific segments of the population that emerge. Over time, you’ll start to identify the organic posts that resonate with each group and can craft content that is better targeted to those groups.
This will give you an idea of the trending conversations and hashtags relevant to your business. In addition to this, you can also use social listening tools like Hypefury to dig deeper into conversations about what’s trending on the internet and what people are talking about.
Social listening can help you narrow down specific keywords so you can see what people are discussing when it comes to your industry or topic of interest. This can help you get ahead of the curve when a new trend starts sweeping a niche or audience segment.
Niche trends
Jumping on generic trends can only get you so far. You need to tune into the trend topics specific to your industry so as to better reach the people who are likely to like your content!
Twitter topics
You can now follow overall topics so as to view a wide range of posts on a certain subject. This is a great way of expanding your base of followed accounts meaningfully and finding out who is influential in specific topic areas.
To access the list of topics you can follow, go to your Twitter feed and navigate to the button that says “More” on the left side of your feed. From this menu bar, click “Topics.” This will take you to a page of Twitter-recommended topics that you can follow.
Here you’ll see suggested topics that tally with your current timeline and you can also search and follow topics of interest. As soon as you start following some trends, your feed will show you topics of preference based on the algorithm.
How to create trending content
Create content around the trends in your industry
After embedding yourself in your industry’s community, you should start creating content that addresses the trends that are dominant in your industry’s field.
For example, if your audience talks about a problem your product or service can solve or a question you can answer, you can solve this problem and answer these questions with your content. You get to grow an audience specific to the industry because you’re answering everything your target group wants!
Retweet and quote tweet interesting topics
This is one of the easiest ways to grow your audience and interact with the one you already have.
If you mention someone’s name, for example, a blog author, in a quote tweet, you will instantly be in front of that person’s audience. This is the perfect way to increase your audience while engaging passively!
Join conversations
As you see certain stories and topics dominate the conversation on Twitter daily, you should share your perspective so your audience can see your line of thinking.
There’s so much value in joining in conversations on social media as a brand, but the key here is relevancy. Don’t join just any bandwagon, join conversations that relate to your niche and to topics and/or causes that matter to you as a brand!
When doing so, it’s important to not only reflect the audience’s general sentiment towards the topic, but also to stay true to your brand values and voice.
Relate trending topics to your product
Tweets should reflect your values and link back to what you’re offering. For example, don’t use #MotivationalMondays if you don’t do anything related to advice giving!
But if you write a great newsletter about cinema, for instance, and the Oscars are trending, jump on that band waggon and direct people to your work.
Find users’ problems
When you monitor trending keywords, hashtags and topics, you’ll start to learn what matters to your audience. For larger brands, Twitter presents a huge opportunity to listen in on what customers are saying about the issues in your industry and community.
From there, they can get an idea of what types of helpful content to highlight to this audience, leveraging the same industry topics.
Utilize trend takeover
Trend Takeover is a Twitter feature that puts your ad alongside trending topics. This will allow you to display your message front and center without the need to generate a campaign to get a trending hashtag going.
According to Twitter, this generates 3x more effective message association, 3x increase in trend engagement, and 9x more effective favorability metrics. These trends will run for 24 hours within a country starting at midnight.
Identify connected keywords and hashtags
Learning about trending topics on Twitter involves knowing the keywords and hashtags that people are using surrounding those topics.
Which words and phrases are people using in regards to those topics? What are they specifically not using? You can learn a lot from researching top tweets. Knowing those natural keywords and phrases can help you create tweets that’ll do well with your audience.
Guidelines to follow when creating these trends
Trace the origin of trends before jumping in
Make sure you’re aware of the full context of the trend before contributing or engaging. Additionally, make sure these trends match your brand voice and content guidelines.
Twitter now frequently explains the context of trending topics, or references the original Tweet driving interest in a trend.
Know which trends aren’t the right fit
Some trending hashtags and topics have a huge reach in the general population, but not in niche interest groups.
Take for instance the instant popularity of the show “YOU,” a television series about a serial killer. Memes and references about it have expanded well outside the typical TV audience, making it a great fit for brands with the Gen Z audiences that have helped drive the show’s popularity.
You have to consider the brand personality you want to portray and the type of audience you want to reach. For example, the “YOU” trend may not sit so well with an older audience, or with a more professionally-oriented content strategy that doesn’t frequently reference entertainment trends.
Lean into the creative
If the trends do not exactly relate to your niche category, you can still join the play after doing some research. Simply participating in popular trends could have some impact on your brand visibility and engagement, but you need to get creative if you really want to stand out. That means finding unique angles to work the trend into your social media and content strategy.
Even some trends that don’t naturally fit into your niche could still work for you if you give it a creative twist. A clever tweet can attract people and make them engage with your account. Memes and GIFs are a good way to explore this avenue.
Anticipate trending topics
If there are any national events coming up, such as Mother’s Day or Valentines’ Day, it is easy to anticipate what kind of content will go popular.
This can help you in forming crisp tweets in advance and you will only have to post them when the hashtags actually come up in trend. You can even schedule posts in advance by using Hypefury so that your tweet will be live as soon as the trend begins.
You can anticipate what topics will trend weeks or even months from now. This gives you the time to craft high-quality content that will be thrive when the big day comes!
Showcase your values
Creating content from trends is also a good way to display your account’s values and vision. It will help people to understand what you stand for and if they should align with you.
Balance timely with timeless
Your audience follows your brand because they’re interested in your product or service, not necessarily your perspective on the up-to-the-second news. Too many tweets using trending topics can come across as trying too hard to be cool. Make sure your entire Twitter strategy is balanced!
How will you use trends to benefit your Twitter strategy? Learn more about Twitter marketing with Hypefury’s ultimate guide, and don’t hesitate to try Hypefury for free!
