Twitter Transcendent in 2010

Steve Olenski at Social Media Today caught my eye with this headline: Major shift in Twitter Trends from 2009 to 2010. In my last post, I highlighted how Twitter had made blogs relevant again by giving bloggers a means to draw traffic to their site. My observations make sense when you see the rise of hashtags in Twitter Trends.

2009 Twitter Trends

The top Twitter trends (the rank and duration of a topic on Twitter by What the Trend) was Entertainment with 38% with hashtags a distant 9%. Here's the breakdown:

Entertainment 38%

Sports 14%

Holidays 11%

Business/Tech 11%

Hashtags 9%

Politics 7%

News 4%

Other 6%

2010 Twitter Trends

Twitter users learned how to find each other and share information with hashtags replacing entertainment as the top category.

Hashtags 40%

Entertainment 28%

Sports 10%

Holidays 6%

News 4%

Social Media 4%

Politics 3%

Business/Tech 3%

Other 2%

What are hashtags?

Hashtags give people with common interests a way to find each other. If I'm interested in finding other people attending the consumer electronics show or live tweets from the show, I can search for the hashtag #ces2011. Anyone who posted with that hashtag will appear in my feed. I don't have to know who to follow, I can follow the tag instead.

Hashtags are the new SEO

If you spend any time or money optimizing your web content for search engines (SEO), then you better match it with hashtag optimization for your tweets. Optimized tweets will help all the people in the long tail who need to read your blog find it. Here are 5 reasons why Twitter Drives Traffic to Your Blog with hints for how to do them. Searching for #hashtags led me to this great article: The Art of the Hashtag by Twitter Media.