Facebook is on the bleeding edge, the hippest of the hip and the newest of the new, that’s why this week they decided to officially roll out a new feature that has only been on Twitter for oh, about…forever? We are, of course, talking about the new trending function. Some of you may have seen this phase in and out over the past few months, if so, congratulations! You were test subjects! If you haven’t seen a trending section and still don’t know, just be patient. Facebook is officially rolling it out globally over the next few weeks. What will it mean for your digital marketing efforts? Not a lot right away, but lets take a look at how it functions so you can get ahead of the game!
Essentially, it works the same as Twitter’s trending hashtags. As you can see in the image below, you’ll see a list of topics and clicking those topics will bring you to pages of people talking about the news and the news itself. Not everyone’s trending box will be the same though. Everyone will receive global news of importance, but you’ll also be given news important to your specified interests and Likes.
As far as marketing goes, my money is on Facebook adding advertisements to the trending area. It’s going to start with just news, and it’ll stay just news long enough for everybody to expect there to only be news in the box, and then one day they’ll pull the marketing switch and that’s when you want to be invested. One day people are reading about the latest world news, the next day one of their headlines is “BREAKING: Doritos Contain Bold Flavors!”
It may not be especially elegant, but mark my words, that’s exactly how it’s going to play out.