Twitter and Facebook Release Top Trends for 2009

At the beginning of the month, we shared Google’s 2009 Zeitgeist, the Internet giant’s collection of 2009′s most popular search terms. Now, Facebook and Twitter have chimed in with their own lists of what was hot this past year. Predictably, there is some overlap on the list. For instance, the death of Michael Jackson spurred an outpouring of Tweets and status updates about the King of Pop. Similarly, worries over Swine Flu were a popular topic as reports of the H1N1 virus spread throughout the social media world.

One of the more interesting trends on the Facebook side was the number of people talking about their family online. As the Facebook userbase has grown past 350 million, there has been a substantial increase in the number of older users on the site which has led to a corresponding increase in the number of mentions of the words son, daughter, mom, and dad.

Check below for graphic displays showing the top trends for Twitter and Facebook.