We identified three main elements of a good trend:
- Popularity – the trend should be of interest to many people in our community.
- Novelty – the trend should be about something new. People were not posting about it before, or at least not with the same intensity.
- Timeliness – the trend should surface on Instagram while the real event is taking place.
In this post we discuss the algorithms we use and the system we built to identify trends, rank them and show them in the app.