What’s The Hottest Topic on Twitter?
By Anna Johnson on June 3rd, 2010What’s the most popular topic on Twitter? It turns out that Twitter users favor news stories about technology more than any other topic, and of these, stories about Twitter itself are the most tweeted.
Based on its analysis of 7 months’ of Twitter data, the Pew Research Center has found that 43 percent of the top five stories on Twitter in any given week are technology-based, more than three times as many as the next largest topic.
Most of the tech stories popular on Twitter focus are web-related, with a heavy emphasis on Twitter, Apple and Facebook. Indeed, 9 percent of all news stories, and 21 percent of technology stories on Twitter… are about Twitter! Twitter related stories make the list of the top five more frequently than any other specific subject.
Other popular tech topics are those related to Apple, such as the iPhone and the iPad (which make up 7 percent of all top stories), stories about Facebook (accounting for another 7 percent), stories about Microsoft(4 percent) and news about Google (4 percent).
Perhaps due to the 140 character limit available for tweets, Twitter users typically tweet and retweet headlines and links, rather than comment or discuss news stories. Similarly, such links tend to go to straight news accounts rather than opinion pieces, with 82 percent of links going to news reports and just 18 percent going to opinionated columns or stories.
Twitter users also tend to heavily link to web-only news sources as well as traditional news sources.
While 50 percent of news stories tweeted on Twitter contain links to traditional media outlets (30 percent to American outlets), 40 percent refer to web-only sites such as Mashable and CNET.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the single news outlet that receives the most links from Twitter (19 percent) is CNET. The majority of CNET stories (61 percent) linked-to on Twitter relate to technology, while 23 percent concern business issues.
The second most linked-to site is CNN.com (17 percent of links), which is followed by BBC News (12 percent of links from tweets), Fox News (7 percent) and Wired (6 percent).
Source: Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, May 23, 2010
