• VentureBeat, Thursday, December 9, 2010 12:22 PM

As a little holiday gift to marketers, Twitter is explaining how to win a spot on its popular Trends list. "Twitter Trends are automatically generated by an algorithm that attempts to identify topics that are being talked about more right now than they were previously," the microblogging services writes in a blog post. "The Trends list captures the hottest emerging topics, not just what's most popular. Put another way, Twitter favors novelty over popularity (as BuzzFeed noted in a great article & infographic earlier this week)."

According to VentureBeat, the post was "apparently prompted by speculation that Twitter was blocking WikiLeaks ... from showing up in Trends. It doesn't go into a huge amount of detail, but there seems to be one big takeaway for companies hoping to make a splash (and who aren't going to pay for a Promoted Trend): Go for a big explosion of tweets rather than a constant flow of interest over time." Sometimes, as Twitter points out, "popular terms don't make the Trends list because the velocity of conversation isn't increasing quickly enough, relative to the baseline level of conversation happening on an average day."

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