A trend is a general direction that something is changing, developing or veering toward. In the context of social media, trends are the keywords or hashtags that are popular among a specific audience on a platform like Twitter or TikTok. They’re usually displayed in a social media platform’s explore or trending area. When a topic, hashtag or keyword is trending, it means that it’s being talked about more than usual. A company or person can use this information to create a targeted campaign that will resonate with their audience.

A good example of this is a campaign that used Twitter’s trending feature to get the attention of an influencer with a large social following. By creating a campaign that encouraged the influencer to talk about a product, the company was able to reach a massive audience and increase their chances of generating sales.

To get a video into the trending list on YouTube, it needs to be popular enough to meet the criteria set by YouTube. This includes a minimum number of views, relevance to the search term and adherence to the site’s content guidelines. A video is also more likely to make it into the trending list if it has related keywords in the title.

In addition to determining which videos are featured in the trending list, YouTube also looks at how many times each video is searched for and where the searches come from. For instance, if the same video is being searched for in multiple countries, this can negatively impact its ranking.

Twitter’s algorithm that determines what trends favors spikes in popularity over the amount of time it takes for a topic to reach that point. It’s also worth noting that a hashtag must be relevant and relevant to a lot of people for it to become a trend. This is because the algorithms are not designed to show irrelevant topics or to highlight the interests of individual users.

On Twitter, if a hashtag is selected for the trending list, the hashtag and its related tweets are highlighted at the top of the page, while other posts that mention the topic appear below. The trends are also featured on the right side of the screen and in the Twitter app’s search bar. Twitter users can change the locations they see trends for on their accounts and can toggle between the Trends tab, All News, Science and Technology, Sports, Entertainment and Politics.

The Trends tab on Facebook is tailored to an individual user based on their pages liked, who they follow and their location. However, users can access their personalized trends on their desktop computers by visiting the trending section of their account. On Google+, trending isn’t quite as personalized and is only available in the Search section of an account. This makes it easier to analyze search trends for the entire network. Users can even compare search terms and competitors by using the Google Trends compare tool.