Monitoring Trends on Facebook

The public nature of user generated content on social media platforms offers the possibility for trend monitoring as an insight into the topics that attract the attention of a large fraction of users. While Google Trends and Twitter have already been recognized as a valuable source of trend information by the practitioners and scholars, at the moment there are no practical implementations or research efforts in the field of trend detection over Face book public posts. In this paper we present two contributions towards trend monitoring over Face book public posts. We propose and evaluate a system for trend detection based on the characteristics of the posts shared on Face book. Based on our results we propose three categories of trending topics: 'disruptive events', 'popular topics' and 'daily routines'. We analyze and compare the characteristics of the proposed categories in terms of distribution and information diffusion in order to increase the understanding of emerging trends on Face book. Finally we draw conclusions from our findings in terms of challenges and opportunities for future work in this direction.