Page 173 - Social Media Marketing for Dummies

Using Promoted Trends

Twitter is an exciting social media platform for many reasons, but our favorite
Twitter feature is how trending topics work. Every minute of every day, Twitter
analyzes all the millions of conversations on its platform to determine what’s
trending in a particular moment.

The trending topics get featured next to the user’s feed on the left side. They can
be filtered by geography as well, so, for example, you can choose to see only the
trending topics in the United States or even trending topics that are pertinent to
certain cities. What’s trending on Twitter serves as a barometer of how much
something may be topical in the physical world in any given moment. Trending
topics are definitely not to be missed.

Promoted Trends complement the organic trends and help brands build mass
awareness, announce product launches, highlight events, and build the brand by
association with other cultural events. They work in a similar fashion to trending
topics except that Promoted Trends are defined by the advertiser. A user sees the
Promoted Trend on the left side of the screen with the other trending topics but
with the word Promoted below it. Note, that the Twitter design is always changing
and what may have been on the left side at the time of publishing may now be on
the right side!

As with Promoted Tweets, users can click Promoted Trends to view all the tweets
containing the hashtag or trend terms associated with that Promoted Trend.
Clicking the Promoted Trend takes a user to a search results page that has a Pro-
moted Tweet from the advertiser at the top of it. Other tweets on the search results
page will be unfiltered and open.

Promoted Trends, shown in Figure 9-4, are typically most valuable to buy on days
when major pop culture events are happening and then best when aligned in some
meaningful form around those pop culture events. For example, when the VMAs
(Video Music Awards) air on TV, you might want to buy a Promoted Trend about
music or, more specifically, about an award-winning artist from the VMAs because
a lot of people will be on Twitter talking about the VMAs.

Promoted Trends are extremely popular with marketers, and it is worth buying
the Promoted Trend in advance of the actual day that you want it to run. Because
only one Promoted Trend can run on Twitter on a given day, marketers buy those
terms well in advance of the actual day that they want the ad to run.

CHAPTER 9 Marketing on Twitter 157