Taking Advantage Of Twitter Trends

By Justin Wong, Published November 12, 2014

Tweeting about a trending (AKA “popular”) topic on Twitter can be a surefire way to get some traction for your online reputation. However, finding the right Twitter trends to tweet about can be difficult.

Thankfully, Twitter is designed for this exact thing. Finding the right hashtag can expose your tweet and your brand to thousands (or tens of thousands) of viewers. Even better, if you write a blog post about a trending topic, you can use Twitter to direct an incredible amount of traffic back to your website.

A good place to start your research is right on Twitter itself. The bottom left of your Twitter dashboard shows a list of trending topics in your city. The trick is to find a trend that is both popular and relates to your expertise. Who is your audience? What interests do they have?

At Curve, our followers are mostly fans of marketing, technology, and entrepreneurship, so we make sure the vast majority of our tweets are related to at least one of those topics.

Another place to get ideas is, interestingly enough, on Facebook. Facebook trends is one of our primary sources of breaking news. On the right-hand side of the Facebook dashboard you can see a list of hot trending topics. Once you find a topic you like, you can plug it into Twitter to find the right hashtags and what people are saying about the topic.

Make sure to read a few of articles about the topic itself to get a grasp of what’s happening and what people know so far. The more timely and “in-the-know” you appear, the higher your credibility.

If you’re looking at a topic you don’t know very much about, you can use a free website called Topsy to gauge how positive the attitude is towards a certain word or hashatag. A quick search for disgraced CBC radio host #JianGhomeshi shows he isn’t very popular in the Twitter world. However, this doesn’t mean you should be taking sides. Try to be as impartial as possible when delivering the facts.

Now that you’ve chosen a topic with a lot of buzz and attention, you need to write an article about it to establish yourself as an expert.

Writing a blog post about a trending topic is not as difficult as it appears. If the trending event is still relatively new and unknown, just a general introduction will get people interested. If the trend has been around for a while, recap the events thus far and add your professional analysis of the situation.

For example, one of our most popular blog posts was about an event known as the #Fappening, where numerous actresses had their nude photos leaked online. Since we heard the story break over the weekend, it was easy to write a blog post about what happened and why it was happening on Monday morning. This led to a huge spike in our web traffic for almost a week afterwards.

Here’s what our tweet looked like. Although there weren’t very many retweets, the tweet itself brought in over 250 click-throughs to our Curve blog and was seen over 14,000 times.