A trend is a subject or hashtag that is popular on social media at a given moment. Social networks highlight trends in order to encourage discussion and engagement among their users. In terms of online marketing, trending can offer a fantastic opportunity to gain visibility for your business. However, it’s important to understand how trends work before you can take advantage of them.

Twitter invented the hashtag (credits to Chris Messina) as a clever way of grouping conversations with a common point of interest. This allows people to follow a specific topic and stay up to date on it without having to read all of their feeds. Using the ‘trending’ option on Twitter, you can see what topics are popular right now, including those that have just started. It’s a useful tool for keeping up with the current events, and also for planning future campaigns.

While the word ‘trend’ can be applied to many different things, it is most commonly used in reference to what seems popular at a particular time. This can be anything from fashion, pop culture and entertainment to a political trend reflecting the mood of a nation.

The most important thing to know about a trend is that it can be short-lived. Often, when something starts trending it is due to a one-off event or news item. Once the event or news has passed, the trend will die down and it may be difficult to get your business noticed again. For this reason, you need to carefully plan your campaign and make sure that you are not jumping into a trend too early.

It is also possible to abuse the trending feature by posting unrelated content, and this can lead to accounts being suspended. It’s best to stick with a trend that relates to your business and avoid adding keywords or hashtags that have nothing to do with the subject at hand.

Getting your business to trend is not easy, but it can be done with careful planning and smart marketing. The best way to start is by using a tool like Tweet Binder to analyze the most popular hashtags for a given topic. This gives you the information that you need to decide on a hashtag that will give you the best chance of success. It should be unique, and it should have a call to action that makes people want to tweet about it.

Once you have your hashtag in mind, you can monitor it on social media using tools like Instagram’s Explore page and X (formerly Twitter)’s Trending topics. You can then use it in your own posts to try and generate a trend. Keep in mind that Twitter’s algorithm favors sharp spikes over gradual sustained growth, and you will need to be quick to jump in before the trend disappears. If you’re really ambitious, you can even try to create your own trend by launching a campaign that gets lots of people to use your hashtag.