Twitter/X Trending Glossary

Astroturfing is faking grassroots support with bots or fake accounts to make a message look organic — a deceptive tactic that breaks platform rules and is easy to detect.

A cashtag is a stock or crypto ticker written after the $ symbol — like $BTC — that turns every post about that asset into one clickable, searchable feed.

The For You feed is X's default algorithmic timeline that ranks posts by predicted interest and engagement, not by reverse-chronological recency.

Going viral is when a post spreads rapidly far beyond its author's own followers, carried by reposts and replies to people who never followed the account.

Grok is X's built-in AI assistant, which answers questions inside the app and — among other things — generates the AI summaries you see next to trending topics.

A hashtag is a word or phrase written after the # symbol that groups every post using it under one topic — and on X, enough of them at once can push that topic to trend.

Impressions are the total number of times a post was seen, counting every view — including repeat views by the same person — so the count runs higher than reach.

A Promoted Trend is a paid ad that pins an advertiser's hashtag to the top of X's trends list with a "Promoted" label — bought, not earned.

Reach is the number of unique accounts that saw a post — each account counted once, no matter how many times it appeared on their screen.

A trending topic is any subject surging right now on X's trends list for a given location — it can be a hashtag or a plain keyword or phrase.

A Twitter/X trend is a topic or hashtag that X highlights on its Trends list because many people are posting it at the same time in the same place.

Velocity is how fast posts using a term are growing right now — the single biggest signal X uses to decide what trends.

A WOEID (Where On Earth ID) is the numeric code X/Twitter uses to identify a location, so it can show that place's trends — worldwide is 1.

The X algorithm is the recommendation system that decides which posts show up — and how high — in each user's For You feed, weighing engagement, how fast it arrives, replies and reposts, dwell time, author authority, recency and relevance.

X Premium is X's paid subscription (formerly Twitter Blue) that adds the verified checkmark and boosts a post's reach and reply-ranking.