How to Become a Trending Topic on Twitter

David W


· Social Media

Hitting a trending topic can certainly have a boost for your profile, website or brand – so how can you get yourself trending on Twitter?

Become a magician?  The latest of Derren Brown’s events is on tonight, the show is called “How to be a psychic spy”, apparently in the show he is going to use some kind of psychic powers in order to project an image into our minds. The interesting thing about Derren Brown’s recent series is how the search trends on Google and Twitter have differed and how he has managed to hit the trending topics every friday night:
Google Insights
google-insights-derren-brown

Trendistic
trendistic-derren-brown

So obviously Google is great for gaining a user base and Twitter seems to be the thing that maintains it. The advantage of gaining a large userbase is that you can eventually become a trending topic, but just how many tweets or followers do you need, roughly, to be a trending topic? And how can you influence your ability to become a trending topic?

So if we take the  statistics – 1% of followers RT a tweet, a RT has a depth of around 2 and 1900 RTs are needed to hit the trending topic – that means your first tier tweet (not retweet) needs to hit 190,000 followers, then your trending topic will appear within the hour.

Perhaps I’m concentrating on RT’s too much, perhaps to start of a trending topic it is best to use a hashtag and to discourage re-tweets, this way you should increase your depth as users can customise the tweet to their own tastes. The best way to encourage this is to use a hashtag and invite people to discuss it in the Tweet.

Has anyone had one of their tweets spark off a trending topic?


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Discussion

  • Andrew

    Twitter traffic is rubbish though. Give me one search click for every 20 twitter clicks, I think that ratio’s probably about right. There’s just not enough quality (read: money traffic) coming from Twitter.

  • Ray

    Nice article. Happy to re-tweet it……….

    Andrew – Surely it depends the topic and the degree to which your followers are actually interested in that topic.

  • David W

    I see your point Andrew – but if all you want is to get your name out, perhaps to build your brand and build trust, then becoming a trending topic is a great idea…

  • evilkyAlterly

    I found this funny video site with 2 original video’s up here are the teaser

    ” How to ruin somebodies wedding in 10 easy steeps”

    ” 10 Things you don’t want to do on your first date”

    Check it out link is in my signature.

  • DorothyEliz

    I tried to to a new trending topic but only 1 person caught on. Can you help me? It’s #TLT – Means Tweet Love Tuesday’s- Tweet what you love on Tuesday’s.
    If it is your local pizza place, your parents a friend or just as simple as loving a sunny day. I want to read more I Love…on twitter, I think this would be fun. Lets do it together. When it catches on we then can add TLT- Tweet Love Thursday’s. lol what do you think, advice needed on how to make this popular. Just think a worldwide change….Everyone thinking about Love, Like valentines day for tuesdays and possibly thursdays. lol

  • Lindsay Curren

    I found this helpful, but I do agree that as of now, our analytics show Twitter as the lowest referral, though I try to use Twitter strategically and to build relations. Facebook performs much higher in driving traffic to our site, and then direct/Google or other referring sites that syndicate our work do well too. I wont give up on Twitter, but I would like to see more conversions to click and RT than we currently do. Our magazine is only 4 months only, so there’s time, but I do hope we hit a better ratio soon.

    Thanks for all the clear tips, though, This si great!

    Best,

    Lindsay

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