Top Twitter trends in 2010 compared to Google’s trend report

Because the overly enthusiastic Twitter cheerleaders are applauding that Twitter’s trend list is better than Google’s trend list, we thought we could compare the two and opine with our own two cents. Before we dive in, it should be noted that the use of Twitter is significantly smaller than the use of Google, so the comparison is unfair, but because claims have been laid that the Twitter trend report is more significant, let’s pull back the curtain…

As the year wraps up, various companies are releasing reports of the trends they experienced this year, starting with Google’s Zeitgeist to Twitter’s Year in Review, both outlining user behavior.

Google measured their trends based on fastest growing search terms, outlining the following:

Twitter measured their trends based on highest volume, outlining the following:

The two items on both top 10 lists are “Justin Bieber” and “iPad” which are no surprise. Were these the two largest events in America this year? According to the overlap, yes. Google shows Twitter and Facebook to be in the fastest rising, but because Twitter manually analyzed and sees so many links shared via Facebook, it is unlikely that Facebook and Twitter were accounted for as Google accounted for the terms.

Because the behavior on Twitter and Google is drastically different, I would argue that Twitter captures sentiment better while Google captures overall trends better. Also, Google is not just used more in volume than Twitter but is not a “members only” environment, meaning more people use it. My grandparents use Google but don’t care about Twitter (although my parents are a different story, sigh).

Regardless of quality of trends, both reports are valid and offer a great retrospective for our year and points out the increasing role of technology- that much is certain.