From a famous puddle to a celebrity rant, January showed us a huge range trending topics for the first month of the year. Today we’re looking at the four most talked-about social events and our view on their relevance to brands.

#1 Drummond Puddle Watch

Last year Social Media evolved and brought new technologies, platforms, changes and opportunities along with it. One of the big emerging platforms was Periscope, and its less-used rival Meerkat.

One of the much-discussed aspect about the platform was how it could be used. But we don’t think anyone foresaw it being used quite like this.

On Wednesday the 6^th of January, almost 20,000 tuned into a Periscope broadcast of… a puddle.

What’s our view? Periscope is a platform that has applications and uses that we probably haven’t even thought of yet. You might not get 20,000 people tuning into a puddle ever again but if you haven’t found a place for Periscope in your social campaign you are missing a trick.

#2 Be like Bill

We’re pretty sure we all know Bill by now. Bill is the stick man that took the internet by storm in January. Bill clogged up our timelines with his ‘advice’ on how you should behave online.

His tongue in cheek attitude to the online world gained him quite a hefty following. Bill now has his own Facebook page called ‘Be like Bill’ which currently has 1.5 million likes.

What’s our view? Be Like Bill was created by Eugeniu Croitoru in a bid to subtly call out social media behaviours that annoy us all. Social media etiquette and dos and don’ts are still evolving and brands should also be careful that they’re not unwittingly annoying and irritating their customers with their use of social.

#3 Making a Murderer

In this past month pretty much everyone at Tamar Towers has been talking about the Netflix documentary Making a Murderer. The ten-parter explores the case of Steven Avery who spent 18 years in prison for sexual assault and attempted murder before being exonerated.

The #MakingAMurderer hashtag was used 250,000 times by January 5^th, just two weeks after Netflix first streamed it, and a petition to free Steven Avery reached 500,000 supporters.

Such was the popularity of the show that even President Obama had to send out a personal statement, announcing that as it was a state matter and not a federal one, he could not get involved.

What’s our view? Social media provides users with a platform to voice their opinions and everybody had an opinion about this. We can see why this caused such a storm, with a story this controversial and gripping it would be hard not to talk about it. But the power of online communities to unite around any cause that upsets them is never more relevant than in the customer service arena and some brands still aren’t getting this right, are you?

#4 Kanye West’s Twitter rant

Kanye West went on a bizarre Twitter rant in January due to a perceived slight by another rapper – Wiz Khalifa. The two have had issues since West’s ex Amber Rose left him for Khalifa, and later Khalifa fathered a child with her.

Fast forward a couple of years, and Khalifa and Rose have now split up. But when Khalifa posted a tweet that allegedly referred to West’s new wife – notorious social Media socialite Kim Kardashian – and insulted West’s new choice of album title, it pushed West over the edge and led him to go on a 30 minute tweetstorm.

West later deleted the tweets after Rose waded in and tweeted some, shall we say, very personal information about West.

Awww @kanyewest are u mad I'm not around to play in ur asshole anymore? #FingersInTheBootyAssBitch☝

— Amber Rose (@DaRealAmberRose) January 27, 2016

West later apologised, but it might have been slightly too late, as various memes of Kanye started to appear all over social networking sites.

Poor Kanye.

What’s our view? We’ve blogged this month about predictions of Twitter’s demise. Kanye’s Twitter spat certainly proves that it’s still popular with celebs but we do currently have a question mark over the future of the platform for brands.

As usual the world of social media has thrown things at us we couldn’t possibly have expected at the start of this year. It’s clearly going to keep us all on our toes in 2016!