Very recently, Facebook debuted a new trending topics feature that you may have noticed in the top right-hand corner of your Facebook status feed. While sites such as Twitter have had this for ages, it is a big deal for Facebook to adopt such a solution and will no doubt provide a world of new information to communities around the world. This feature is designed to encourage others to connect around trending themes and can provide access to trending items of interest within your niches and also what is hot globally. There are no doubt plenty of uses for this feature – as those who use Twitter will tell you – and in the following article, we will discuss some ideas for how you can put this to work for your business, brand or website.

The Limitations

At present, the Trending Topics feature appears to be fairly strict in terms of what is displayed and what is not, meaning that you will not necessarily be able to easily push your own content to the feed for a trending topic. It does show the number of likes, shares and comments for each trending sub-item, however, so you may be able to drum up the chances of being displayed via marketing and ad campaigns. We also expect that paid trending topics will emerge at some point in the future, as Facebook is already pinging links in every other format throughout the platform.

New Blog Content

A great way that many people have been using trending topics features on other websites is to come up with new ideas for blog content as it becomes popular, rather than waiting for the so-called crest of popularity to arrive. While the wave of popularity has obviously already occurred on Facebook (as documented by the feed), it usually moves a bit slower throughout the web. This can give you the opportunity to act quickly and get your content out there/indexed in order to maximize exposure. By acting quickly upon this information, the trending topics feature can be a great source of content ideas.

Repurpose Content as Needed

Sometimes, a subject you have already covered on your blog or website will become a hot topic discussion item once again. Whenever this is the case, your content is already existent and ready to go, so the Trending Topics feature can also help you to get existing content out to readers in a quick fashion whenever it is relevant. In many cases, webmasters repurpose their content if certain elements of the story, news or trend have changed, but this will not be necessary in all cases. As Facebook starts pinging links to your feed whenever a select topic is trending, you can quickly spring into action and grab up tons of likes, shares and comments by giving your audience what they’re already looking for!

Conclusion

It remains to be seen how popular the Trending Topics features will be on Facebook, as it has yet to be unveiled to all users. For those in the business of content creation, however, it can be a very useful way to see what is currently being discussed on the network and how to react in order to make the most of it.