SparkToro Trending is an aggregated list of the links most shared by active web marketers on Twitter each day. Basically:
- Trending uses the Twitter accounts of folks who’ve connected with the tool
- The algorithm looks at all the tweeted URLs from all of those accounts
- Point totals are assigned based on how many accounts have tweeted a given link
- Those totals are summed and shown in the list of the days “Trending” items (if they’ve received enough tweets)
- Tweets from certain accounts are weighted higher and lower depending on the quality of links they’ve shared in the past (e.g. if an account tweets links from only the same 2-3 domains, their tweets may not count as highly, and conversely, if an account shares many great links, their tweets may be weighted more heavily — the system also has aggressive anti-vote-ring systems to dampen a set of accounts that may try to game the list)
- Trending does not weight tweeted links based on follower counts
- Over time, the algorithm decays the position of a link (unless it keeps earning lots of new tweets), similar to Reddit, Hacker News, and other upvoted link-based communities
If you’ve got more questions about how Trending’s algorithm functions, please tweet to @randfish.