While the access to trending topics are free and available to everyone, marketing specialists and specific software are more expensive, therefore there are companies that do not have the budget to support those costs. Trending topics are the most discussed topics at the moment on social media platforms, particularly on Twitter and Facebook. We propose a simple model of ranking that explains the mechanism of this anchoring effect. By analyzing patterns of the ranking dynamics we identify anomalies that are likely to result from the platform provider's intervention into the ranking, including the anchoring of hashtags to certain ranks on the HSL. We show how the circadian rhythm affects the popularity of hashtags, and observe categories of their rank trajectories by a machine learning classification algorithm. We characterize the rank dynamics by the time spent by hashtags on the list, the time of the day they appear there, the rank diversity, and by the ranking trajectories. In this study, we investigate the public attention dynamics through the Hot Search List (HSL) of the Chinese microblog Sina Weibo, where trending hashtags are ranked based on a multi-dimensional search volume index. Most popular topics are usually indicated on ranking lists. Microblogging sites are important vehicles for the users to obtain information and shape public opinion thus they are arenas of continuous competition for popularity. English and Arabic languages comprised close to 40% and 20% of the first rank topics, respectively. More than 50% of the topics could not hold the position for more than an hour. Based on our results, 77.6% of the topics that reached the Top-10 list were trending with less than 100k tweets. We propose and analyze our dataset according to six criteria: lexical analysis, time to reach, trend reoccurrence, trending time, tweets count, and language analysis.
To this end, we automatically accessed Twitter’s trends API and stored the resulting 50 top trending topics in a novel dataset. In this article, we thoroughly examined the Twitter’s trending topics of 2018. Nevertheless, there have been very few works focused on the dynamics of these trending topics. 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. In Twitter, a name, phrase, or topic that is mentioned at a greater rate than others is called a "trending topic" or simply “trend”.
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