New Feature: Trending Topics Comes to Facebook

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Last year Facebook added hashtags. I know most of us expected that, but did you expect that it would also add another very Twitter-specific feature? Well, back in August we mentionned Facebook’s intent to launch trending topics. Well, it’s been a few months, and sure enough Facebook has started to roll out trending subjects on the right-hand side of the News Feed.

Also Read: Facebook’s intent to launch Trending Topics

Needless to say that it’s also available on mobile. Facebook trending topics will be simply called “Trending” and the idea is that now any user will be able to see a list of personalised topics that are currently popular, based on that user’s interests.

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With the amount of content floating around on Facebook, the new feature will certainly help some topics that might have been buried in the trash, to get more attention. Attention to the right-hand column on Facebook has seen diminishing since everything pretty much moved to the News Feed.

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The Trending algorithm will chose stories due to their “sharp increase in popularity”, and apparently it going to be all about mentions – how many mentions a specific subject gets. The sheer volume of stories about a specific topic shouldn’t do much to affect the algorithm. Trends will appear as titles with a short description, and Facebook users will be able to click on each Trend to see a list of relevant content.

I know what you are thinking. Next big thing on Facebook Advertising… Sponsored or Promoted content. Do you think this is the return of “Sponsored Stories”? For now, we don’t know and all we can do is guess, until Trending will be fully rolled out around the globe. US, UK, Canada, India, and Australia will get the feature first in the next few weeks, so keep your eye out for it!

Now, if you were one of the test users for Trending we’d love to hear from you and what you think about the feature.