Rio 2016, US election and ‘Pokemon Go': Twitter's top trends in 2016

Twitter (TWTR) has released a list of its top trends through the year and the Olympics in Rio, the U.S. election and hit mobile game "Pokemon Go" made the top three.

The microblogging service has become a key place for real-time conversations about events and big topics. The top ten ranking is made up of the most popular global hashtags on Twitter from January 1 to November 10, 2016.

The 2016 Olympics games in Rio took the top spot on Twitter's global trend list. Team U.S.A got the most gold medals but some of the most popular tweets included Brazilian soccer star Neymar doing Jamaican runner Usain Bolt's famous celebration, as well as American Gymnast Simone Biles meeting actor Zac Efron.

Twitter was very central to the election where much of the back and forth between the two candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton played out. The social media service streamed some of the debates during the campaign. On November 7, before the result, Twitter announced that over 1 billion tweets had been sent out by people in the U.S. about the election since the primary debates began in August 2015.

The most retweeted was this one by Clinton:

Nintendo and Niantic's hit mobile game "Pokemon Go" took the world by storm. As everyone was on the hunt for Pikachu and other fictional creatures in the real world, scenes like this happened:

Here are the top 10 global trends on Twitter:

• Rio2016

• Election2016

• PokemonGo

• Euro2016

• Oscars

• Brexit

• BlackLivesMatter

• Trump

• RIP

• GameOfThrones

Twitter also released a list of the most retweeted tweets in 2016 and number one is surprising – a Spanish gamer who tweeted the word "Limonada" which means lemonade. In a YouTube video, he explained that he would give away a bunch of prizes and all people had to do to enter was to retweet his tweet.

This led to it getting over 1.3 million retweets.