If you’re using twitter you won’t get very far without seeing someone put a ‘#’ in front of a word or phrase.  So what is this all about?  Hashtags were created to be able to monitor trends and create a simple way to search for a specific event, area, service etc.  Creating a hashtag is simple, but getting people to continue to use it is the tricky part.  With the use of hashtags comes the ability to monitor that tag with ease.  You can monitor hashtags in several ways using a program like Tweetdeck or by using Twitter’s powerful search engine.  A useful way to monitor what’s going in town is to find the hashtag that corresponds with your area, in Burlington’s case, it’s #BTV.  I find that monitoring that hashtag is the best way to keep an eye on all that’s around me in Burlington.  If there’s something going on, someone will tweet about it.  For instance, Grace Potter announced the morning of her CD release day that she would be putting on a free show on Church St. in Burlington.  About two hours after she announced that on Twitter, the non-tweeps around me (a tweep is someone who uses twitter) found out.  My point here is that news travels fast on Twitter, something like we’ve never seen before.

Social Trending Experiment

Last week I came up with the idea to play a little Twitter experiment.  I wanted to try and get a hashtag that created a trend.  By trending I mean that people continue to talk about that certain subject and use the given hashtag over and over again. Not only did I want to see people talking about something that was created here at Union Street Media, but I wanted it to be a fun, and be a great way to interact with the people and companies around us.  The idea focused on taking a picture of your workspace whether it be of your own desk or a picture of your office.  I grabbed an image I had previously taken and posted it with the hashtag #btvworkspace and also #btv to target the area around us.  It caught on fast because people not only want to share what they have around them, but they are curious to see other people’s workspaces as well. It wasn’t long before we were trending locally.  We were completely satisfied and were extremely happy everyone was enjoying sharing pictures and talking about their offices.  The key thing was to interact with our followers and also pick some up along the way. We were able to increase our followers by 8% and establish a better connection with our followers.  The moral of the story here is:   if you want to be successful on Twitter, you need to follow trends and even try to start one of your own. Follow Union Street Media on Twitter