Getting trending on social media can bring a lot of exposure to your brand, content and campaigns. It also increases your community and engagement. However, being a trending topic isn’t always easy. You need to get your followers engaged with your hashtag and campaign so that it goes viral, which takes time.

There are different factors that go into making something a trend, but the most important factor is whether it’s a conversation people want to engage with and talk about. It also depends on the platform, as some platforms have their own way of determining trends. For example, Twitter has a different criteria for what trends, and it’s more focused on the number of tweets using a certain hashtag.

Being a trend on YouTube is more complicated than on other platforms. The trending section displays videos that are popular with a given audience, so the algorithm has to look at various signals including video views and engagements, location, and language preferences. YouTube tries to ensure that the videos displayed on the Trending tab are safe for all viewers. That includes ensuring that they don’t have profanity, mature content or other inappropriate material.

The company has been under pressure to be more transparent about how it determines what appears on the list. YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki recently addressed this by writing a letter to creators saying the company takes its responsibility for curating the Trending list seriously. She also promised to focus on promoting more creator content on the list going forward.

To make it to the list, a hashtag or keyword needs to have a concentrated spike in traffic in a short period of time. The algorithms used by different social networks then take that data into account to determine whether it deserves to be trending. Twitter, for example, uses a combination of factors, including the number of new tweets containing the keyword and hashtag, and how many of those tweets are retweeted.

Another factor is how consistent a hashtag is, and that depends on how long the hashtag has been around. If a hashtag is consistently popular, it will eventually reach the top of the trending lists.

A good strategy for brands and influencers who want to make it to the trending lists is to create their own hashtag and campaigns. That will ensure that they have a dedicated audience and will be more likely to be noticed by the platforms’ algorithms.

Then, they can provide a call-to-action that will drive the audience to the hashtag or campaign. Having a unique hashtag also makes it easier to track the effectiveness of a campaign and identify the best ways to improve it in the future. It’s worth noting that if you don’t like what’s being trended on Twitter, you can change your trends preferences by clicking “change” next to the trending box. You can switch to seeing trends tailored to your location or even the United States. However, this may impact the volume of trending topics you see.