▲ ▼ Why something is trending on the social networks
I'm not constantly hooked to social networks, but when I do occasionally use it; I find some topic trending but unable to find the reason until I put some reasonable amount of time in searching for it.
I think there is a need gap for a service which shows what is trending, where and why is it trending as well in one single place. Please let me know if there is any such service already.
I have a tool that is called https://www.MyTweetAlerts.com - it is a new and better way to search Twitter. Email alert for Twitter. In that tool I can find tweets that have more than x number of likes or retweets about some subject and in that way spot tweets before they go viral or use it to find tweets that have a lot of likes or retweets (that are currently trending).
For example I did create this page to show all coronavirus tweets with more than 10K likes:
https://www.mytweetalerts.com/coronavirus/viral-tweets
So I am really interested in this topic :)
Hey MyTweetAlerts is cool and is half way to what I want, if you could add a background source to the viral hashtag/tweet it would be perfect. Twitter sometimes does show the background of the a viral hashtag when clicked like a News Source; but most of the times it just shows some irrelevant tweet using that hashtag.
And setting an alert for such hashtags is a cherry on the top!
What do you mean by background source - can you show me some examples?
Sure, when you click a trending hashtag on Twitter some times you'll get the News article upon which the trend is based upon directly from the source but often you'll see some random tweet using that hashtag.
So, if you are showing a viral trend on MyTweetAlerts showing a background source of the trending term should help to find why something is trending and to prevent fake news.
I recently launched a product aimed an helping people discover interesting threads. Feel free to contribute (and provide feedback):
https://www.threadcache.com/
Some background:
There are many interesting twitter threads I have come across and so I decided to make a product where people can search and discover these interesting threads as well as submit new ones.
The goal is for it to be as simple as possible and as easy as possible to search for tweets using user generated tags.
Hi, sounds interesting; but do you have plans to show why something is trending?
When the trending topic is associated with an event, or something which is covered widely on the news, then clicking on the trending hashtag in Twitter does show some news source for it. But, if the trending topic is obscure then it will be a hard time finding why that hashtag is trending as clicking on the trend would just lead to tweets which includes that tag. Of-course, this is just w.r.t Twitter I presume finding why something is trending on other social networks except reddit are not straightforward.
As far as twitter is concerned, their data consumption API is flexible for reading tweets and anyone can implement this as a feature in a 3rd party website/app; but there is no such API for Facebook and so this need gap needs to be addressed by Facebook itself.
Yes, trending hashtags which got generated because of a trending news is easier to find the reason in Twitter but some hashtags are tough to find the reason for say like those which formed from some meme.