Posts Tagged ‘Social Networking’

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.

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