Twitter Launches ‘Local Trends’ for Nigeria

On Monday April 11th of 2011, Twitter announced that they have launched local trends in 70 new locations around the world, including Nigeria the most populous country in Africa. The feature which launched in a few countries back in January 2010 exposes what people are talking most about on a state or city level. 

We first launched Trends as a useful way for people to find out what topics are being talked about around the world, right now. Early last year, we added Local Trends to make it easier to find more locally relevant topics in specific countries and metropolitan locations. Today, we’re adding Trends for more than 70 new cities and countries – bringing the total number of locations to more than 100. -Twitter. 

In November 2010, Twitter announced that they were expanding local trends to 14 new countries and 6 new cities, which included some of the site’s fastest growing markets. Just last week, Twitter added Nigeria to the list of countries with local trends.

At the moment, only Lagos, apparently the largest Twitter community in Nigeria is listed on Twitter’s ‘Local Trends’. Twitter had previously explained that “locations are not manually selected, but rather displayed dynamically based on tweet volume.”

I’m guessing that other cities in Nigeria would get on the ‘Local Trends’ list once there are signs of huge tweet volume coming from that area. It would be interesting to see what the local trends for Lagos would reveal, although as at time of writing this, the trends for Lagos didn’t reveal anything local.