#ILoveWalgreens is "trending" on Twitter worldwide. Why?
Twitter suggests #ILoveWalgreens is the hottest trending topic right now:
Why is it trending (beside the obvious "promoted" label), and is there any useful data in the information that's being posted with this tag? We ran our social math app, and it's mostly "noise", with the exception of expressscripts:
It's trending, because people are talking about it trending. :) Most tweets appear to fall into one of two categories:
1. people asking why Walgreens is trending
2. people explaining why they think it is trending
What are Promoted Trends?
Promoted Trends began as an extension of our Promoted Tweets platform, and are now a full-fledged product in their own right. With Promoted Trends, users see time-, context-, and event-sensitive trends promoted by our advertising partners. These paid Promoted Trends appear at the top of the Trending Topics list on Twitter and are clearly marked as "Promoted."
How is a Promoted Trend different from a Trending Topic?
Users interact with Promoted Trends the same way they interact with any other Trending Topic. They are able to click on a Promoted Trend to view all Tweets containing the trending #hashtag or trend terms. They are also able to Tweet about the Promoted Trend by including the terms in their Tweets. The only real difference is that a Promoted Trend is purchased by an advertiser and clearly marked as being promoted.
Social media is becoming a powerful marketing tool. It also exhibits a very bad signal-to-noise ratio. In order to track effectiveness of a social media campagn, it is important to be able to extract useful information - genuine remarks, opinions, unique content - before running reports, sentiment analysis etc.
With social media, after you are done filtering, "big data" actually becomes quite small.
by Michael Alatortsev
