Ladies and gentlemen, trending topics are now active on Facebook. When I first read the post on TechCrunch and Huffington Post, I was like, “Okay, finally!”
For those who are in the social media industry, you know this day would come but you definitely didn’t except it to show up – like right now!
I love to consider this new Facebook feature, a pretty similar one when compared to Twitter. Twitter’s trending topics feature is one of the most used tools for many Internet Marketers like me. Knowing what’s hot could easily make marketing much easier and in most cases, even more lucrative in terms of generating sales revenue.
If you have yet to see any trending topics on your Facebook account, don’t be worried. Facebook has just launched this feature only for several regions such as the US, UK, Canada, India and Australia. The rest will follow in the coming weeks or even months, and it will slowly rolls out to mobile users (yes, it is only for desktop users only for now).
But hey, what is Facebook trending topics all about?
If you are in the said regions, you’ll see it on the top right (sidebar) of your Facebook homepage. Basically, it will display a number of news which is supposed to be related to your interest.
Logically speaking, the algorithm is related to what your are interested in, pages you may like, location based and as well as what’s trending generally on Facebook (source).
Facebook trending topics is actually created to share the latest topics with users. In other words, Facebook is trying to achieve the goal of becoming an online newspaper for users around the world.
Take a moment to think about it. Receiving all the latest news while checking out your Facebook account? That’s pretty awesome, don’t you think so?
Imagine having the opportunity to receive the latest news from the pages you follow (for example) without creating numerous bookmarks and lists. Now, that’s a real killer!
Why is Facebook trending topics an important move for the giant?
Facebook has always been in the rat race with Twitter. Even with a larger market share, Facebook is constantly facing challenges when portraying to its customers when compared to Twitter.
Quoted directly from Mark Zuckerberg, he plans to take Facebook to the next level by creating a unified model of understanding the world that’s powered by artificial intelligence. So, this feature may very well be the stepping stone he and his team is looking for.
Snippet taken from Facebook: Topics are personalized based on things you’re interested in and what is trending across Facebook overall.
The most noticeable feature on Facebook trending topics is that it has a little description right beside the title – which I personally feel is a good move to do so.
We learned and discussed about call-to-actions and having a little subtitle in the trending topic is going to drive the conversation up by over a mile (when compared to Twitter).
According to several sources, Facebook trending topics are considered more basic compared to Twitter as it (literally) provides a simple timeline with all the related topics based on your personalization settings while Twitter provides photos and social updates into its own feature.
Here’s what they look like side by side:
What to expect from Facebook trending topics?
Facebook trending topic is still (very much) in the development stage. You should be expecting the usual hookups and mess ups in the beta stages. However, give it sometime to evolve and this may very well be the turning tide for Facebook.
Even an editor from TechCrunch has commented that the Facebook trending posts are sharing some unrelated topics with him.
I am expecting Facebook trending topics feature to grow rapidly in the coming weeks. After all, they have over 1,3 billion users to perform numerous A/B testings; keep a close eye on this and you may well benefit from it!
See also: How To Increase Facebook Organic Reach Without Any Hacks
