Mummy, where do trending topics come from? According to HP’s Social Computing Research Group, maybe not where you think.
The researchers analysed 16.32 million tweets on 3361 different trending topics between September and October of last year to figure out just what made a topic trend. The key: retweets, especially retweets by power news accounts like @nytimes or @breakingnews. Less important are sheer volume of tweets, or tweets from celebrity-type “influencers”.
The full report above walks you through the methodology in more depth, with lots of fancy mathemagics and such. But the main takeaway: trending topics are fleeting as the wind, while the accounts that make them are as venerable as stone. [Mashable]