Every-so-often I like to click on Twitter’s promoted trend of the day to see if the conversation is on-topic and what the general sentiment is like.
I was a bit surprised by yesterday’s #BlueberryOatmeal promoted trend at just how many people were tweeting about the fact that it was trending (thinking it was organically trending).
Tweets generally fell into 3 categories:
Category 1 - The Observers
Category 2 - The Inquisitors
Category 3 - The Frustrated
At the point I looked, about 40% of the tweets fell into these three categories each thinking that #BlueberryOatmeal was organically trending – not realizing (despite the yellow “promoted” indicator) that this was a paid media buy and only showed up in the trending topics list because the brand behind it gave Twitter money to have it show up there.
In the end, I supposed it doesn’t really matter from a brand perspective whether Twitter users know whether the trend is paid or organic but that people are talking about it – and the good news in this case is that many of the tweets were positive “social impressions” celebrating the fact that Blueberry Oatmeal sounded good to eat.

