The future of trending topics on Twitter?

Today the top trending topic on Twitter is a marketing promotion. It’s not an ‘organic’ trending topic.

It’s #moonfruit. Moonfruit provides a website builder for web users. 

In celebration of their 1oth birthday, they’re giving away 10 Macbook Pro’s for 10 days. To win, Twitter user simply have to mention the hashtag #moonfruit in their tweets.  Anyone can win. Thankfully, tweets made using automated tweets are disqualified.

This morning, #moonfruit is trending above Michael Jackson and #iranelection

Moonfruit are not the first company to use the trending topics for promotion, and certainly won’t be the last.

For a long time, Twitter has had the feel of a medium that allows users to share and exchange at a grassroots level. Trending topics were real and could pretty much be relied upon as hot topics.

People are looking for organic and real in their online communication. That’s one of the reason Twitter works so well. You can choose to unfollow those who tweet nothing but promotions, and you can build real networks and even friendships.

We’ve seen how easily a company can move their topic to the top of the Twitter trending topics with a clever promotion. In the future, it’s inevitable that more companies will jump onto promoting their product or service through the Twitter hashtags.

It would be sad though, to look at the hot topics and see only promotions– especially if it comes to the point where Twitter fills up with corresponding tweets about the promo hashtags. (At the moment, a few promotion hashtag tweets here and there is unlikely to bother anyone.)

Perhaps, if this starts to happen, Twitter will respond in some way to both accommodate promotions and preserve organic hashtags?

Let’s hope so.

For the moment, you couldn’t criticise Moonfruit or anyone else for using the hashtags in this way. After all, there’s an awful lot of promotion going on in Twitter! And Moonfruit does offer a great product, which the writer of this article has used before, and has recommended to people for years.

Hey, so do a get a Macbook now? ;

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