How? Simply include the trending term in your tweet. Then, anyone who clicks the trending topic will see your ad, for free. Today’s example comes in the form of “Apple Shampoo,” a song from Blink 182 that is being shared aggressively today because of a tweet from band member Mark Hoppus (@markhoppus).
Here’s an example: most of the tweets below really have nothing to do with the band or the song, but are rather an ad for some sort of affiliate marketing scheme. Visiting the offending user’s account on Twitter, it’s clear that they’re simply using Twitter to push affiliate links, and now exploiting trending topics to gain more traffic.
Putting yourself in the mind of the spammer for a moment, here's why this is so attractive: unlike typical Twitter spam, which involves mass following in hopes of gaining return followers, this is far more convenient and harder for Twitter to police. As opposed to needing to build up a following in order to get traffic for your message (Twitter has been doing a much better job of stopping this), now all you need to do is include a trending topic in your tweet.