Trending is a social media feature that highlights topics, hashtags and keywords that are popular on Twitter and Facebook at a particular moment. A trending topic can be anything from a meme to an international news event. Trending is an important aspect of online marketing because it can help your business reach more potential customers and increase engagement on your social media accounts.

How a trend is determined varies between social media platforms. Twitter, for example, looks at the location of the people searching for a certain topic to decide what trends it should highlight. It also considers how long the topic has been trending and how many searches are being made for that particular keyword or tag. Twitter also censors some trends, especially if they are offensive or inappropriate.

Getting your business to trend isn’t easy, however. You’ll need to create a new and unique hashtag that people will want to use in order for it to become trending. You’ll also need to be careful about timing, since trending topics usually only remain popular for a short time. A company that can get its message out during this window of opportunity is likely to enjoy a surge in traffic and attention.

A company may find itself trending for a variety of reasons, such as a recent news story that has gone viral, a celebrity death or even an unusually high number of searches for a particular phrase or term. For a small business, getting on the trending list can be a huge boon for visibility and awareness, as it can put your business in front of a large audience.

The downside to this is that trends can be extremely volatile, as the popularity of a particular hashtag or topic can change quickly and for unexpected reasons. For example, if your brand name is trending on Twitter, you can expect to see a significant spike in website traffic, which could then have an adverse effect on your bottom line. Trends can also be misleading, as they can be influenced by inaccurate data and people who are trying to manipulate the system for their own benefit.

The ambiguity of the word “trending” has led to some controversy. In the past, Twitter censored trending topics that it felt were offensive or inappropriate, but this policy has been recently removed. In addition, it’s possible to misuse the trending feature by adding unrelated keywords or hashtags to posts in order to appear in search results, which can cause a business to be thrown off the trending list. This type of abuse is discouraged by Twitter, and breaking its rules can lead to account suspension. As a result, it’s best to avoid abusing the trends feature in any way.