Facebook has released its annual ‘Topics and Trends’ report, which outlines the key topics that saw increased discussion across both Facebook and Instagram in 2020.
The addition of Instagram data is new for this year’s report – as explained by Facebook:
“We explored thousands of topics that grew on Facebook and – for the first time in this report series – on Instagram. In our 2020 edition of The Topics and Trends Report, we looked at data from January 2018 through June 2019; for our 2021 edition, we shifted our date range by three months (April 2019 through September 2020) to capture some of the major changes in people’s lives during the pandemic.”
So it’s more of a pandemic trends report than a 2020 summary overall, but really, with the months of the year seeming to compress the longer the lockdowns and mitigation efforts have dragged on, it’s hard to really know where 2020 begins and ends either way.
The 40-page report looks at trends across eight markets, providing insight into key discussions in a range of areas.
Each topic includes a regional breakdown, providing an overview of how the discussion has evolved in different parts of the world.
As you can see in the top right of the screenshot, this summary relates to US users, providing an overview of how these topics have grown over time. Other charts look at the growth of key topics in different regions.
The insights provide more perspective on how each of these discussions has evolved, and what Facebook and Instagram users have been most interested in. You can also break each down into the region of your choice – with Facebook’s interactive ‘Hot Topics’ tool, you can check out comparative growth for various key topics by region using the dropdown options.
That will then give you a breakdown of that topic’s performance relative to your chosen market.
The broader ‘Topics and Trends’ report, however, aims to highlight key topics of growth overall, and the regional insights provide additional perspective on which are gaining the most traction – including digital transformation in India:
There’s a heap of interesting insights here, which could be of relevance to your brand, and could help to shape your approach based on the topics that are gaining traction in relation to your niche.
It’s definitely worth checking out – you can download the full Facebook ‘Topics and Trends Report’ for 2021 here.
