An astounding 25 billion Tweets were sent in 2010. These have all been analyzed to identify the year’s Top 10 Trends, as well as the leading Trends in eight categories:
- News Events
- People
- Movies,
- Television
- Technology
- World Cup
- Sports
- Hashtags
Each Trend in the Top 10 list includes multiple related terms, to give the most accurate view of the topics that people cared about most in 2010.
From the findings we can see that the main tweeted topic overall was regarding the oil spill in the Gulf which occurred back in April.
Two films make it into the Top 10; Leonardo DiCaprio’s Inception at 3rd place as well the seventh installment in the Harry Potter phenomenon, Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows, which came in in 9th overall.
And as for music, no overall Top 10 entry for Lady Gaga this year but Justin Bieber was not unsurprisingly tweeted the most in this genre. Lady Gaga does appear however – as high as third in the Most Tweeted People chart, one position behind Dilma Rouseff – Brazil’s newly elected and first female President.
Wikileaks’ founder Julian Assange makes a late surge for fourth position.
In the Most Tweeted Television category, the MTV Video Music Awards takes the crown closely followed by ABC’s family TV show, Pretty Little Liars.
As expected the Most Tweeted Technology category brought up all the tweeted terms one would expect of the Twitterati. The iPad, iPhone, Google’s Android were all tweeted about accordingly. But it is the entry at 5th place; Call of Duty: Black Ops that brings video games into the Tweet charts for the first time. Not surprising for a game that smashed all records within 24hrs of going on sale.
Of course, 2010 was Word Cup year and this was the reason a Most Tweeted World Cup category was added. Not surprisingly the event itself (FIFA World Cup) was the most tweeted within this category. Interestingly a word and a product which only 12 months ago, no-one had heard of, made it into second place. The Vuvuzela was introduced to the world and now the world was tweeting its merits.
In third place, above Dunga, Maradona, Ronaldo, Messi sits Pulpo Paul a German psychic octopus who successfully predicted the results of all the games.
In the Most Tweeted Sports category, US All-Star basketball player, Lebron James out-tweeted all others.
Within the Hashtag category, the first thing that may strike you is that twitterati loved their hashtags in 2010. Whereas they made up just 9% of the trending topics in 2009, they gobbled up a whopping 40% of the pie in 2010, stealing a good bit of ground from entertainment topics.
So, as we slowly slip towards the end of 2010 we look forward to seeing more and more of us embracing the Twitter bird in 2011 and all who fly beneath her. We couldn’t even begin to guess what the 2011 trends will be?