A Comprehensive Analysis of Twitter Trending Topics

Twitter is among the most used microblogging and online social networking services. In Twitter, a name, phrase, or topic that is mentioned at a greater rate than others is called a "trending topic" or simply "trend". Twitter trends has shown their powerful ability in many public events, elections and market changes. Nevertheless, there has been very few works focusing on understanding the dynamics of these trending topics. In this article, we thoroughly examined the Twitter's trending topics of 2018. To this end, we accessed Twitter's trends API for the full year of 2018 and devised six criteria to analyze our dataset. These six criteria are: lexical analysis, time to reach, trend reoccurrence, trending time, tweets count, and language analysis. In addition to providing general statistics and top trending topics regarding each criterion, we computed several distributions that explain this bulk of data.