A Comprehensive Analysis of Twitter Trending Topics

TL;DR

This paper provides a detailed analysis of Twitter's trending topics in 2018, examining their dynamics, characteristics, and linguistic features using a novel dataset and multiple analytical criteria.

Contribution

It introduces a new dataset of trending topics and offers a comprehensive analysis of their temporal and linguistic properties, filling a gap in understanding Twitter trend dynamics.

Findings

77.6% of top-10 trends had less than 100k tweets

Over 50% of trends lasted less than an hour

English and Arabic were the most common languages for top trends

Abstract

In Twitter, a name, phrase, or topic that is mentioned at a greater rate than others is called a "trending topic" or simply "trend". Twitter trends list has a powerful ability to promote public events such as natural events, political scandals, market changes and other types of breaking news. Nevertheless, there have been very few works focused on the dynamics of these trending topics. In this article, we thoroughly examined the Twitter's trending topics of 2018. To this end, we automatically accessed Twitter's trends API and stored the resulting 50 top trending topics in a novel dataset. We propose and analyze our dataset according to six criteria: lexical analysis, time to reach, trend reoccurrence, trending time, tweets count, and language analysis. Based on our results, 77.6% of the topics that reached the Top-10 list were trending with less than 100k tweets. More than 50% of the topics could not hold the position for more than an hour. English and Arabic languages comprised close to 40% and 20% of the first rank topics, respectively.