A trend is a general direction in which something seems to be going at any given moment. A trend can be seen in pop culture and entertainment, the market or even politics. It can be fun or serious, last a day or a year and is constantly changing.

Keeping up with trends on social media platforms such as Twitter and TikTok allows businesses to stay relevant and receive a boost in engagement on their posts. When a topic, hashtag or keyword becomes popular on a platform’s Trending page, it indicates that people are having conversations about it and interacting with it in greater numbers than usual.

Trends are generally identified by algorithms created by a social media platform. Twitter, for example, displays trends based on users’ locations, the content they like and who they follow. Facebook also tailors its trends to each user’s location and interests, but you can change the settings on your account so that you see more universal trends.

When a hashtag or word is trending, that typically indicates that it has become more popular than normal among people on a particular platform, often due to a current event or news story. If you want your business to appear on the trending page, you can encourage your followers to use a specific hashtag to talk about a certain topic. Twitter has a list of trending hashtags that you can use in your posts. TikTok has a similar feature that shows trending hashtags based on popularity.

You can also look up trends on Google. The search engine’s Trends tool shows the percentage of searches for a particular term over time and by region. This is useful for determining what people are searching for and talking about, but it doesn’t take into account things such as multiple searches from the same person or keywords that are infrequently used.

Using Google Trends is a good way to get a sense of the overall interest in a topic. Journalists often use it to illustrate what people are interested in at a particular moment, and it can be helpful for companies looking to create their own content.

Some trends, such as a popular song or meme, are more predictable than others, but you can still be surprised by what ends up trending at any time. For example, in the mid-2000s, MySpace was a major player in the social networking scene. At one point, it was a huge trending topic on Twitter.