Top Trends in Social Media 2010

What’s do Justin Beiber, the iPad, the FIFA World Cup and the earthquake in Haiti have in common?  Well, for one thing it seems like they all got the social media universe talking like nobody’s business in 2010. Facebook and Twitter have just released the top trending topics in their platforms through 2010, and those 4 are the only ones that feature on both lists.

Beiber Fever hit fever pitch this year, with Sept 12^th, his debut on the MTV Video Music Awards seeing most mentions of him on Facebook. The World Cup was unsurprising, considering it was a global media event. In fact, it was the second most popular mention on Facebook as well as Twitter. In fact at key moments, almost 50% of all Facebook status updates were related to the world cup. Wow!

Another big topic this year was the iGadgets, specifically the iPhone and the iPad. Not all of the posts were positive, but together there were 25 million posts on this over the year, showing how important mobile technology and Apple have become.

Meanwhile the earthquake on Haiti, a disaster on an unimaginable scale was naturally another subject people continued to talk about through the year. Status messages came even from ground zero, where rescue workers and trapped victims took to social media to spread the updates worldwide.

However, according to the second Facebook Memology study, the absolute top global trend for 2010 was none of those four. It was a simple acronym; HMU, short for “Hit me up”. According to the social networking site, about 1600 posts a day contained that acronym at the end of 2009. Fast forward to one year later, and HMU mentions are up to nearly 80,000 mentions a day. Who knew an acronym could go viral?

Other than the earthquake in Haiti, another disaster dominated the conversation on Facebook. This time it was the Chilean miners’ incident where 33 miners were trapped underground for 69 days until their eventual rescue.  Meanwhile conversation about movies, Facebook games, 2011 and interestingly enough, lyrics of the song “Airplanes” rounded off the Facebook top ten.

On Twitter though, it was the Gulf Oil Spill that dominated the conversation. The oil spill was a topic that was as politically charged as can be, so no wonder people turned to the internet to vent. At number three on Twitter was Christopher Nolan’s inception, possibly Hollywood’s biggest release this year, at least in terms of interest. Another movie, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 too featured in this list. And unlike Facebook, Google’s Android OS shared space with the iPad on Twitter’s list.

To check out the complete lists, click here for the Twitter Top Trends and click here to see the Facebook Memology Study.