“Trending” has become a normalized word in our society’s vocabulary. We’ve gotten used to seeing it since it’s debut on Twitter, and it has recently spread over to Facebook as well. A “trend” is a subject that is algorithmically determined to be one of the most popular on Twitter at that specific moment, not  one from the past day or the past week. Getting your campaign to trend has become coveted by marketers because it is proof that your campaign is working, and millions of people have seen it. Since Twitter’s platform is designed around quick bursts of information that encourage user response, the longer your topic is trending, the more engaged people are with your campaign.

First Trends List                                                                                           Second Trends List

How Trending Works

The “United States Trends” lists above were captured 40 minutes apart. On Twitter, potential trends are found by polling all tweets for repeated hashtags, and their trending status is determined by a combination of times tweeted and the volume of tweets containing the hashtag. As you can see, #CancelColbert jumped up into second place but #tyleroakleylivestream and #catphotofriday quickly got booted off the top 10. Trending is a very valuable tool for marketers and brands. Not only can you, as a marketer, see what topics are currently being discussed and driving the most buzz, but you can also browse the topic’s thread and hashtag to get an immediate sense of  user’s reactions, ideas, and opinions about it. Through trending, brands can also grow the size of their following and their reach. Plus, since followers get to choose what brand’s movement they want to be a part of in the Twitterverse they will hopefully mirror that loyalty in daily life.

How to Consistently Trend

Twitter Parties are an excellent way to excite and grow your fan base, get followers directly involved with your brand, reward them for top engagement, and attempt to achieve a spot on the “top trends” list. By engaging social influencers with a Twitter hashtag simultaneously, a surge of tweets can occur over a short period of time, if done correctly. It’s key for a brand to successfully moderate the conversation and have a powerful group of influencers in order to get them to naturally spread the word among their friends and close networks. An effective way to get those influential people is by working with our army of influencers, primarily women and moms who control the everyday spending decisions of their household.

Our most recent Twitter Parties occurred in February and in March 2014. After analyzing our data, we are pleased to report that our February Twitter Party trended #4 in the US and our March Twitter Party trended #1 in the US! We also pulled figures for the number of influencers that participated, the number of tweets generated, the number of followers reached on Twitter, and the number of impressions that were made during each Twitter Party in the charts below.