Cision pulled together a great blog post on this topic.
And recently at Social Fresh EAST we pulled together a little data of our own.
Cision looked at three different trending topics and the Twitter activity that lead to them being featured. Of those Cision reviewed, the number of tweets per hour leading up to the trending topic moment ranged from several thousand to a few hundred. 
Each topic went from fairly low activity to comparatively higher spike in volume for at least 2 hours.
Every time we put on a Social Fresh Conference, our hashtag, #socialfresh, trends #1 in the US. Our hashtag also goes from low activity to a peak of 1,000 an hour during an eve.
So what can we infer from all this?
- It is easier to get a hashtag trending than you might think
- Use a hashtag that does not already have a high daily volume
- Use calls to action (like a verbal prompt, contest, clicktotweet, etc) with large groups to focus as many tweets as you can in a short time period. 500 hundred tweets per hour is the shortest I have seen succeed, but your mileage may vary.
- Events are great for generating a trending topic whether you are hosting a company retreat, conference, webinar, or Tweetup.
- BONUS: Pre-plan some quality tweets of your own to make sure they get feaured as “top tweets” for the trend. And consider running an ad against your own trending topic with a clear call to action.
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