Last night I noticed on my mobile Facebook app “Richard Sherman” was trending after his explosive rant. Today I looked at my phone and noticed someone mentioned the hashtag #omaha in their Facebook message and it related it to a trending topic, called, you guessed it, “omaha”. When you click on the hashtag, it does what you think it does- it displays a list of related posts with that hashtag. It seems like they had this plan for a while, when they first introduced the hashtag and they were waiting for users to become accustomed to the tags. Now they’re following in the footsteps of Twitter. Instagram also uses similar hashtags so it’s natural Facebook uses that technology after buying the company.
This trending technique isn’t anything new. I’ve been looking at news sites like Yahoo and Google use this feature for a while now. I hope Facebook has a new trending section so I can see what is most searched for, it would be a great help when writing news articles.