Twitter Trending Topics and Their Effect on Online Reputation

Thursday, November 19th, 2009 at 10:22 am

Twitter trending topics are a great way to know what is on people’s mind and what they are twitting about right now. The fact that these lines are being written on a Sunday morning, 12 hours after the airing of Saturday Night Live in the United States has a lot to do with “SNL” being a trending topic at the moment on Twitter, as many people are simply reacting to the popular sketch show. SNL is television show broadcasted across the United States for over 34 years and as a result, a Google query for SNL returns 10.5 millions pages. The fact that SNL is a trending topic will not necessarily affect its Google Resume, but what happens to the web visibility of an unknown person or company that for one reason or another becomes a trending topic on Twitter? The short answer: becoming a trending topic on Twitter for an unknown person or business could have an immediate and lasting effect on the way this entity would show up on search engines. Trending topics on Twitter are often marked with hashtags (#) as the person who is originally twitting is interested in further input or the continuation of the discussion about the topic at hand. When explaining what a hashtags is wthashtag.com says, “Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets, similar to how tags work for blogs”. If a professional or a businesses that had limited visibility on the web becomes a trending topic on Twitter even for one hour, this would create thousands of hashtags, or essentially thousands of tags that a search engine would associate with that name. A business that becomes a trending topic for doing something negative could be facing a serious online reputation problem, as this negative association is not coming from one source but many. Although it is not a small company, AT&T is certainly feeling the affects of letting its customers down across the United States. Google #attfail to learn more.

SNL is television show broadcasted across the United States for over 34 years and as a result, a Google query for SNL returns 10.5 millions pages. The fact that SNL is a trending topic will not necessarily affect its Google Resume, but what happens to the web visibility of an unknown person or company that for one reason or another becomes a trending topic on Twitter?

The short answer: becoming a trending topic on Twitter for an unknown person or business could have an immediate and lasting effect on the way this entity would show up on search engines.

Trending topics on Twitter are often marked with hashtags (#) as the person who is originally twitting is interested in further input or the continuation of the discussion about the topic at hand. When explaining what a hashtags is wthashtag.com says, “Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets, similar to how tags work for blogs”.

If a professional or a businesses that had limited visibility on the web becomes a trending topic on Twitter even for one hour, this would create thousands of hashtags, or essentially thousands of tags that a search engine would associate with that name. A business that becomes a trending topic for doing something negative could be facing a serious online reputation problem, as this negative association is not coming from one source but many. Although it is not a small company, AT&T is certainly feeling the affects of letting its customers down across the United States. Google #attfail to learn more.

Ehud Furman is the CEO of LookupPage. LookupPage specializes in improving the online visibility of professionals and businesses. LookupPage Pro guarantees online visibility on the first page of Google.For more information and case studies about branding, online reputation management and social media marketing visit the LookupPage Blog

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