Since its launch on July, 15 2006, twitter has grown from a tiny seedling to a bean stock that could tower over the world’s tallest building Burj Khalifa. With a current registered customer base of 613,830,280 the phenomenon of Twitter continues to pick-up steam along with the spike in social-media capable news sources around the world.

The question is what aspect of twitter is leading to this amazing growth? There are many features of twitter that businesses are using to engage current and potential prospects including groups/lists, paid promotion, custom profiles, @ mentions and re-tweets. The most important one that I failed to mention was the almighty #TrendingTopic.

A trending topic is denoted by placing a hash (#) in front of a word deemed important within your tweet (add something relevant – for example #ecommerceplatform). As Alicia Cowan explains,” A hashtag groups tweets together on a particular subject. When you add a ‘#’ directly in front of a word (or acronym) on Twitter – a link is automatically created. This is called a hashtag. When you click on the link you will see the latest tweets containing that hashtag, making them easy to find among the millions of tweets sent each day. Hashtags are user generated. Their popularity has grown organically to become part of Twitter culture and a valuable tool for users”.

The most valuable component of trending topics is being able to effectively incorporate them into your event marketing schemes. The SalesWarp team recently went out to Chicago for the 2012 Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition. Our marketing team came up with a “Find Your Online Treasure with SalesWarp” campaign to create booth-traffic on the showroom floor.

Leading up to IRCE, we incorporated the hashtags #IRCE2012 and #1612 in our slider ads, email blasts, promotions and social media announcements. Utilizing these tags allowed us to direct a handful of prospects to our booth. Visitors inquired further information about our SalesWarp Storefront Management System as well as various giveaways that we announced using the #IRCE2012 tag.

Additionally, trending topics carry enormous marketing value because they act as a real-time data feed for everyone that is connected to them. Constantly tweeting out a content-specific hashtag related to your company is a great way to gain traction in a niche market. It’s often a tough task to create enough buzz around a topic that you are trying to trend.

As a solution, many different companies will pick out a commonly used hashtag E-commerce, Technology, Storefront, Etc) and include them within their tweet. This in return opens up your chosen topic to wide range of industry prospects that check certain hashtags for information on a daily basis. Lets just say, #TrendingTopics make the world go round.