The Year in Trending Topics: Top 10 Companies on Twitter in 2010

This is an exhausting time of the year for our editorial partner What the Trend. The trend-tracking company -- as you know if you've been following the weekly AdAge.com charticle we put together with them most Fridays in 2010 -- monitors both the rank and duration of every single topic that pops up on Twitter's global Trending Topics chart. And in the final weeks of the year, the WTT staff spends long hours trying to make sense of it all.

WTT CEO Ingo Muschenetz tells me that his team tracked more than 20,000 Twitter trending topics in 2010; they pulled the top 5,000 and then aggregated those into 1,400 topics. That approach is why WTT's trend analysis differs from Twitter's own year-end review. As Ingo explains, WTT uses "a combination of user-submitted and algorithmic categorizations to group individual trends into topics, allowing us to get a truer picture of why things trend." For example, one tweet may mention an iPod, another may mention an iPad, while neither mentions Apple -- though, of course, both tweets are about Apple products.

Speaking of Apple -- you saw this coming, right? -- it tops our list of the Top 10 companies on Twitter in 2010. It's probably no shock, either, that tech and gadget companies dominate the rest of the list, but, wait, Uniqlo? If you read my colleague Jennifer Whitehead's report back in September -- titled "Uniqlo's U.K. Twitter Campaign Looks to Be a Perfect Fit for Retailer" and subtitled "Every Time Someone Tweets About an Item, Company Drops the Price, Boosting Web Presence and Brand Recognition" -- well, you saw that coming, too. The BBC, meanwhile, was widely discussed on Twitter because of various controversies -- including a 48-hour walkout last month (see: BBC Staff Strikes Over Changes to Pension Plan).

What the Trend's Top 10 Companies on Twitter in 2010

1. Apple
2. Google
3. Twitter
4. Uniqlo
5. Research in Motion
6. Microsoft
7. Facebook
8. Nintendo
9. Sony
10. BBC

We'll have more quick Top 10 lists, courtesy of our friends at What the Trend, tomorrow and Thursday. In the meantime, check out WTT's general Year in Review page right here.

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Simon Dumenco is the "Media Guy" media columnist for Advertising Age. You can follow him on Twitter @simondumenco.