Twitter Trending Topics: How Are These Generated?

After analyzing 16.32 million tweets on 3,361 different trending topics from September to October last year, the HP Social Computing Research Group has released the results of their study.

Based on the research, Twitter’s algorithm for trending topics cares more on the specific subject and reach of a tweet, rather than who tweets it and how often it’s tweeted. HP discovered that around 31% of trending topics are retweets, and 72% of those came from mainstream media like CNN, NY Times, The Telegraph, ESPN, Breaking News, and Huffington Post. Simply put, contents that made Twitter trends was largely news from traditional media sources, and was then amplified by retweets.

Check out the embedded report from HP’s Social Computing Research Group below for more details.

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