Twitter Trends – Why they are Irrelevant

Why Twitter Trends are Irrelevant

  1. Introduction
  2. Why Twitter Trends are Important
  3. Why Twitter Trends are Irrelevant
  4. Can we Save Twitter Trends

Twitter Trends have been an integral part of Twitter since the day they were introduced. There was always a sense of achievement when one saw their hashtag or term trending on Twitter.

AFAIK, Twitter had introduced them with an intention to ensure that content around specific topic could be easily discovered and people can know what is going on across the Twitterverse.

Before I delve into why Twitter Trends are irrelevant, let us understand the importance of Twitter Trends.

Why Twitter Trends are Important

1. For focused conversations

One of the oft-used term is – On Social Media it is important to be ‘social’ which means brands and people have to keep engaging.

Twitter Trends helped to keep that engagement focused. People & brands keep using hashtags or particular term based on a topic to talk about things and exchange thoughts.

One of the best use cases we have seen so far is people leveraging it during calamities and sports events thus enabling the message to spread far and wide ensuring deeper engagement.

2. For Discoverability

While helping brands and people engage over certain topics or events using a hashtag/terms, they are also one of the best ways to ensure your content is easily discovered.

You can easily use the ‘Search’ feature of Twitter to discover content under certain hashtags or terms and start engaging. Remember not all things make it to Twitter Trends and it needs certain amount of engagement to make it to the list.

But Why Hashtags are Irrelevant

Sometime back on my Facebook, I had put out an update telling the world how happy I was to see Twitter Trends on that day.

On that day in particular, I had hardly seen any ‘politically’ driven trend.

Now if you’re like me and love Twitter more than any other platform and also like to discover and engage in meaningful conversations, you would have noted the fall in quality of trends over last few years.

Most of the times today, the trends are being dominated by political conversations who ‘supposedly’ employ an army of people with dubious accounts and sometimes ‘bots’ to drive conversations.

Little do they know that they are just adding to the meaningless noise and the platform will turn into a mess over time reducing the dependence on it thus driving people away. And lesser the number of people, harder will it be for them to reach the targeted audience.

So over time, Twitter Trends could become irrelevant and folks like me will have no trust in them since we know they have been fabricated.

Here’s a funny take on how Twitter Trends become irrelevant.

Source – http://johngushue.typepad.com/blog/2009/05/twitter-trends-and-the-hump-of-irrelevance.html

Needless to say, I saw folks immediately commenting that they are happy too seeing not ‘political’ trend.

Can we Save Twitter Trends?

Can we?? Really I am asking that?? Is it really possible to have a ‘saner’ version of Twitter Trends?

I would say, the first responsibility lies with Twitter. They will have to devise ways and means to make Twitter Trends ‘cleaner’. They will have to start weeding out fake accounts, bots and also control the kind of content that goes out on its platform. Tough task since they are an ‘open’ platform, but somewhere certain lines have to be drawn.

The second and most important stakeholder is us. Can we expect our clan to behave ‘responsibly’? Sometime back I had written – ‘Social Media was supposed to bring the world closer’ but what we see is the exact opposite of that. Can WE start reporting to Twitter, any content that we find ‘offensive’? The degree of getting ‘offensive’ might differ with each individual but then I expect many of us to know what really is ‘good’ for us and the world.

Can we really do that?? Do give a try and let me know

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