Businesses should pay attention to the most popular search topics on Twitter in order to take advantage of their popularity and gain traffic, an industry expert has said.
The comments come as Twitter has released its top trending topics for 2009, with Google Wave, swine flu and Iran among the most popular topics.
Professional blogger Darren Rowse, who runs ProBlogger.com, says businesses should view Twitter trends as a tool to keep themselves up-to-date with popular search topics that could come in handy.
“I think it can help to keep your finger on the pulse in different niches. I think the trends can be particularly useful for news organisations and so on, but most of the trending tools are fairly broad. If you happen to run a niche business or site and a topic being searched for comes into that, then that would be useful.”
Many businesses already use the Google Zeitgeist report to determine the biggest search trends on the internet, and then update their sites accordingly.
But Rowse says businesses shouldn’t use a trending keyword to increase traffic to their site if the trends don’t have anything to do with the business or its goals.
“You want to keep the trends pretty relevant, and I guess there are so many people trying to get traffic for those types of words at the moment so it becomes a bit cluttered. Unless, of course, you have a site with some ranking power.”
“But I think Twitter has really exploded onto the scene, and I suspect what we’ll see happen is Google using more and more of these real time search results and it will be interest to see what content publishers do.”
Twitter announced the trends on its official blog, saying it had begun to critically analyse and gather data relating to searches.
“In 2009, Twitter’s Trending Topics helped us understand what was happening around the world, showing us that people everywhere can be united in concern around important events; excited about a new movie; or geek-out about a major new technology.”
The post also noted the top trending searches of the year related to the Iranian elections, which gained significant media attention due to the use of Twitter by protestors to organise themselves.
“These are Twitter’s top Trending Topics across several categories — an interesting time capsule of what was happening as this decade came to a close.”
News events
1. #iranelection
2. Swine Flu
3. Gaza
4. Iran
5. Tehran
6. #swineflu
7. AIG
8. #uksnow
9. Earth Hour
10. #inaug09
People
1. Michael Jackson
2. Susan Boyle
3. Adam Lambert
4. Kobe (Bryant)
5. Chris Brown
6. Chuck Norris
7. Joe Wilson
8. Tiger Woods
9. Christian Bale
10. A-Rod (Alex Rodriguez)
Technology
1. Google Wave
2. Snow Leopard
3. Tweetdeck
4. Windows 7
5. CES
6. Palm Pre
7. Google Latitude
8. #E3
9. #amazonfail
10. Macworld
Hash tags
1. #musicmonday
2. #iranelection
3. #sxsw
4. #swineflu
5. #nevertrust
6. #mm
7. #rememberwhen
8. #3drunkwords
9. #unacceptable
10. #iwish
Patrick Stafford is a freelance journalist and a former deputy editor of SmartCompany.
