What are the HR topics most frequently mentioned in social updates (e.g., tweets) and in published content (e.g., blogs and news stories, etc.) during the last three months?
This post has the answer. Here’s how we compiled this list. Using HRmarketer Insight we:
- Streamed about 4,000 Twitter IDs that actively tweet and share content on HR and related business topics (e.g., recruiting, talent management, benefits, etc.). This means we analyzed every tweet for each Twitter ID including the shared content.
- In addition to streaming tweets we also, when publicly available, streamed LinkedIn and Facebook updates from this data set of active Twitter IDs.
- Finally, we analyzed RSS feeds for about 2,000 HR blogs and other media properties in the HR, recruiting and benefits space.
- We did this for three months.
From this data we identified the most popular human resource topics for the last three months.
The Difference Between Popular and Trending
Popular topics show up a lot in analyzed data. In the HR space, there are some topics that have been popular for years: employee engagement, big data, healthcare. This does not mean they are trending. Trending classification is based how often the phrase is showing up in recently analyzed data (e.g., two weeks).
It is possible to have a highly popular topic (big data) that is trending down as the chart below shows. This does not mean the topic is not popular, just less popular than it was two weeks ago. It is also important to realize that our list of most popular topics is industry wide. When you drill down to a functional area of HR (e.g., labor law) you will see an entirely different set of popular topics as the charts below show:
 Popular HR Topics: Industry Wide (click to enlarge) |
 Popular HR Topics: Labor Law (click to enlarge) |
The difference between popular and trending is important for content marketers that want to piggyback on the increased attention of a trending topic by publishing timely content on the trending topic.
The top 35 most popular topics in HR for the last three months

There is a Difference Between What’s Popular and What’s Trending. Notice how “employee appreciation” is trending because March 4th was employee appreciation day in the U.S. (click to enlarge)
1. Millennials
2. Health Care
3. Employee Engagement
4. Big Data
5. Mentoring
6. Unemployment
7. Working Environment
8. Health Insurance
9. Company Culture
10. Talent Acquisition
11. Wellness
12. Employee Benefits
13. Performance Management
14. Leadership Development
15. Work Life Balance
16. Artificial Intelligence
17. Employment Law
18. HR technology
19. Mental Health
20. Risk Management
21. Affordable Care Act
22. Cloud Computing
23. Performance Review
24. SaaS
25. Team Building
26. Recruiting Process
27. Minimum Wage
28. Candidate Experience
29. Career Pathing
30. Department of Labor
31. Emotional Intelligence
32. Retirement Planning
33. Equal Opportunity
34. Flexible Working
35. Baby Boomer
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