- What Twitter’s Trending Topics Told Us About the World in 2010 [CHARTS]
Twitter recently released its own list of the top trends of 2010, but we thought we’d take a closer look to see how usage habits have evolved on everybody’s favorite real-time information network. With the help of our friends over at What The Trend, the fine folks who provide us with the weekly dish on what’s hot in the Twitterverse, we offer some insight into a year’s worth of 140 character conversations.
The first thing that may strike you about the data below is that tweeters loved their hashtags in 2010. Usage of popular trending tags like #NowPlaying and #FollowFriday surged. Whereas they made up just 9% of the trending topics in 2009, they gobbled up a whopping 40% of the pie in 2010, stealing a good bit of ground from entertainment topics.
But entertainment hung on this year, as Twitter has always been the place to share what you’re watching, playing or listening to. Interestingly, music beats out TV in the entertainment vertical, thanks no doubt to the awesome power of Twitter’s boy king himself, Justin Bieber. His only Twitter trend rival, the unstoppable Korean pop group Super Junior, raked in 10% of the music-related trends, falling short of Bieber’s 27%.
TV appears to be a more fractured space. While the topic nabbed 30% of all entertainment-related trends, top tweet earner Glee only came out with 5% of that pie. It’s interesting to see music so dominated by a handful of performers while tastes in television appear to be much more diverse.
Sports have always been big on Twitter, and none bigger in 2010 than the worldwide obsession with soccer (futbol). Propelled by a deluge of tweets around the 2010 World Cup this past summer, the topic has rarely been out of the top trends, even after the tournament’s conclusion. As you can see from the breakdown below, soccer took home the lion’s share of the conversation with 45% of all trending sports chatter.
The data below was compiled by Liz Pullen of What The Trend, who sifted through nearly 20,000 of the year’s Twitter trends from around the world. The top 5,000 of those were aggregated into about 1,400 “topics” so they could be illustrated with clarity in these charts. For more info on a year’s worth of trending topics, head over to What The Trend’s comprehensive Year in Review section.
2009 vs. 2010
Hashtags
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Entertainment
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Sports
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