Are trending topics useful for marketing?: visibility of trending topics vs traditional advertisement

Abstract

Trending Topics seem to be a powerful tool to be used in marketing and advertisement contexts, however there is not any rigorous analysis that demonstrates this. In this paper we present a first effort in this direction. We use a dataset including more than 110K Trending Topics from 35 countries collected over a period of 3 months as basis to characterize the visibility offered by Local Trending Topics. Furthermore, by using metrics that rely on the exposure time of Trending Topics and the penetration of Twitter, we compare the visibility provided by Trending Topics and traditional advertisement channels such as newspapers' ads or radio-stations' commercials for several countries. Our study confirms that Trending Topics offer a comparable visibility to the aforementioned traditional advertisement channels in those countries where we have conducted our comparison study. Then, we conclude that Trending Topics can be useful in marketing and advertisement contexts at least in the analyzed countries.