Benefitting from Twitter Trending Topics without Being Spammy

Trending topics have been a valuable part of Twitter and Twitter search for some time, but the addition of trending Twitter topics displayed on each user’s home page is a recent addition by the company. The benefits for you are twofold: you can see what important discussions are taking place on Twitter, and you can promote your Twitter profile by participating in these discussions.

Instead of having to go to a third party Twitter application or Twitter’s own search homepage, you can now see what the most heavily discussed topics on Twitter are without leaving the main site. Reaching the level of trending Twitter topics has become a badge of honor for many, akin to the TechCrunch crash effect where your site would receive so much traffic after being reviewed on TechCrunch that it would simply crash, or the Digg effect, where a site would crash from all the traffic originating from a related Digg that had reached the front page of the social bookmarking site.

While there’s likely less crashing going on these days, it’s very clear that achieving a trending Twitter topic is a great way to indirectly reroute traffic back to your own site, or at least ensure that you’re becoming a big chunk of the topics being talked about on the popular microblogging platform.

But what if you can’t get your latest blog post or product to become a trending topic? Just take part in some of the discussions. You’ll still increase the visibility and accessibility to your homepage, which in turn can prompt others to check out your other tweets as well as the URL you’ve listed on your bio. Because when other users click on a given trending Twitter topic, they’re more likely to see your related tweets as a result.

There are a few things to look out for, however. Joining in on Twitter discussions in this manner can quickly and easily get spammy, and many spammers out there have already started to take advantage of this process. Some spammers will increase their chances of gaining visibility by mentioning multiple trending topics in a single tweet.

It’s rare that multiple trending topics will go well together in a single sentence, so when spammers employ this tactic it’s rather obvious.
But sticking to trending topics that still interest you and/or pertain to your own branding purposes will help ensure that you’re avoiding the spam methods all together, and your tweets will remain genuine.

If you’d like a helpful browser add-on that displays an explanation of a given trending Twitter topic while you’re on Twitter, check out this browser script here.

Image credit: CNet

Written by Kristen Nicole from Kristen Nicole
Posted on June 17th, 2009 and filed under Blogging
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