Purpose: “What’s happening?” around you can be spread through the very pronounced social media to everybody. It provides a powerful platform that brings to light the latest news, trends and happenings around the world in “near instant” time. Microblog is a popular Web service that enables users to post small pieces of digital content, such as text, picture, video and link to external resource. The raw data from microblog prove indispensable in extracting information from it, offering a way to single out the physical events and popular topics prevalent in social media. This study aims to present and review the varied methods carried out for event detection from microblogs. An event is an activity or action with a clear finite duration in which the target entity plays a key role. Event detection helps in the timely understanding of people’s opinion and actual condition of the detected events. Design/methodology/approach: This paper presents a study of various approaches adopted for event detection from microblogs. The approaches are reviewed according to the techniques used, applications and the element detected (event or topic). Findings: Various ideas explored, important observations inferred, corresponding outcomes and assessment of results from those approaches are discussed. Originality/value: The approaches and techniques for event detection are studied in two categories: first, based on the kind of event being detected (physical occurrence or emerging/popular topic) and second, within each category, the approaches further categorized into supervised- and unsupervised-based techniques. © 2018, Emerald Publishing Limited.