Facebook Top Trends 2010: HMU, World Cup, Movies

Facebook has released its global list of top status trends. The top three were highly social in context, highlighting Facebook as the preferred online destination to hang out with real friends.

The top trend ‘HMU’ came as a big surprise. It stands for “hit me up”, meaning ‘to give someone a phone call, page, instant message or email’.

The HMU trend started in 2009 with about 20 posts a day and by the end of the 2009, there were 1,600 HMU related posts a day. In 2010, HMU grew aggressively, increasing by about 75 percent each month. By the end of summer, the figure soared to about 80,000 mentions per day.

Second place ‘World Cup’ is also a trend in Google, Yahoo and Twitter’s year in review. On Facebook, the start of the game and finals were two moments where spikes were experienced. There were 1.5 million mentions at the start of the game and 1.3 million mentions at the final stages.

The top 5 movies on Facebook were ‘Toy Story 3’, ‘Twilight’, ‘Inception’ (which is also on Twitter’s trend list), ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and ‘Iron Man 2’. Facebook also had an interesting finding about people and movies. By studying the time difference between mobile and web spike mentions, Facebook estimated that it took 30 minutes for people to get home. Below is the complete top ten status trends list. Check out Facebook’s blog to learn more.

We realized the difference in the trends reported by Facebook, Google, Twitter and Yahoo. Major trends like the iPad, Haiti, Justin Bieber and World Cup are similar. But Facebook is unique, as its top trend happened to be something that was out of the blue. It’s a good sign for Facebook as it shows users are comfortable to share their social outings on the network. Thus, proving that Facebook is indeed the preferred online networking destination, slowly connecting the world onto this one website.

With a large user base, it can be anything it wants to be. 2011 could be a year for us to witness Facebook matching up to Google’s prowess.