Blog: Twitter’s trending topics show entertainment dominates discussion

Twitter has released data of the most popular trends on the social networking website of 2010, revealing that 'entertainment' topics had dominated the discussion, followed by 'sports' and 'holidays'.

Liz Pullen of What The Trend has compiled the data into useful graphs to visually show these results.

Overall however, it was a news story that topped the discussion with the phrase 'Gulf Oil Spill' being the most used discussion. Unsuprisingly, the big event of 2010 that was 'Fifa World Cup' was the second most popular trending topic overall.

Hashtags proved to be popular in 2010, with a 30% increase in 2009, and the most popular topic being discussed this way was music, with the '#nowplaying' discussion.

Steve Holden, Managing Director of Prominent Media and Communications, said: "The end of the year a time for reflection on the year passed and looking forward to the future, and these statistics are a good insight into the past year of social media.

"The fact that hashtags have become so popular shows that more people are taking advantage of the tools that Twitter's offers, and that people want to want to engage in discussions.

"News topics may have only ranked for 4% of the overall discussions, but the fact that the most used phrase of 2010 was 'Gulf Oil Spill' shows that people were not overlooking the most significant events."