Facebook recently launched a trending section which is visible on the top right hand side of the homepage for it’s web visitors. The feature isn’t currently available on mobile. Since this is a major change on the homepage and seems to compete with Twitter’s trending topics, it has piqued the interest of marketers. So, before your brand manager presents a snazzy presentation on Facebook Trends, it’s smart to get an indepth view of what these “trends” means for your business.

First, what is trending?
According to Facebook, “it’s a personalised list of the most mentioned words and phrases at the current time with short explanations of why each is blowing up. A click-through leads to a page of mentions by friends and public posts by anyone who lets people “follow” them.” 

Facebook has an “explanation” feature which details why a particular topic is trending. This might seem to some as an improvement on Twitter because the challenge there is that often it isn’t clear why something is trending. Facebook’s explanation clarifies the why, and stokes a user’s interest which might generate more clickthroughs for Facebook. 

I don’t think Facebook Trends will directly be used as a revenue source until Facebook gets the product right.

For marketers, an important question has been—is Facebook personalising trends based on a user’s interests? Facebook claims: “Topics are personalised based on things you’re interested in and what is trending across Facebook overall.” I doubt though that the feeds are personalised. This is a quick snapshot of the trends on my profile for the past two days:

Day 1
But, I barely ever like any sports pages, and am as uninterested in Microsoft as in Justin Beiber. On my larger friends list also, there were very few people talking about 'Jai Ho' that day. In fact, more people had updates on the movie the next day but it wasn’t trending then. 

 Day 2
Again, no one on my list was talking about the Celebrity Cricket League or the Chinese tennis player, Li Na. On Republic Day, there were definitely several posts by friends or pages I liked but that is still on the second place for me. So, it seems Facebook takes a more macroscopic view of trends—more at a region level, not at an individual level. Also, Facebook Trends aggregate the headlines of the day while Twitter Trending Topics check the pulse of the moment. More users would be interested in that “pulse check”.  

As marketers, does Facebook Trends change our lives? Although Twitter does use this feature as a source of revenue, Facebook is yet to announce anything like that. Even in the near future, I don’t think Facebook Trends will directly be used as a revenue source at least not until Facebook gets the product right via various iterations. 

Source: Facebook

So, why have it in the first place, you might ask? I think they introduced it for three reasons—to build further engagement and clickthroughs, serve Facebook’s objective of being the ultimate news destination (considering Facebook is currently the largest medium in the world; bigger than any newspaper or TV channel ever!), and to capture current consumer interest by which the company could eventually drive more real time marketing/advertising. Actually, “real time” is the goldmine for today’s advertisers. Facebook must be hoping their trending feature will help them get to that. 

Apart from brands which are involved in the highly topical issues such as movies, cricket and politics, I see this having little benefit to marketers in its current avatar. If you are promoting a new movie which will get mass traction on a specific day or if a politician gets talked about a lot on a given day, the trending features makes what’s popular more popular but it doesn’t have the ability to make something “trendy” out of an issue people are hardly interested in. For instance, Akshay Kumar’s new movie 'Holiday' probably reached out to a much larger audience since it was trending across the home page of millions of people who logged onto Facebook in India. On the other hand, actress Parineeti Chopra began trending after the release of her movie when her performance was appreciated and not when the trailer/movie was released. Clearly, the Akshay Kumar release has more interest to begin with. 

 Another reason why Facebook’s trends are unlikely to take away from Twitter’s is because most content on Twitter is public. One can see the opinions of both people you know personally, and those that you don’t. However, Facebook’s privacy settings make it more restrictive. Their move towards the trends seems directed more to their goal of being a one-stop news source rather than a brand medium. Brand messages will come up when Facebook  as a news source is firmly established in the minds of the consumer. Considering the fact that it’s the largest media platform in history, that seems quite possible. But, that is definitely not now, or even in the next six months. And, that’s as far as one can forecast about anything on the internet! 

Saurabh Parmar is the founder of Brandlogist Communications. He is also a visting faculty at Indian Institute of Mass Communication, Delhi. You can reach him here: www.facebook.com/Brandlogist.