Every city or town needs a simple Twitter hashtag (i.e. #MadisonCT, #BaltimoreMD)

A quick thought…

Some cities and towns have active visitor-focused and tourism-related organizations that market their hometown well and respond quickly to requests for information about what’s happening locally. There are also cities and towns that have a hashtag they’ve created and promoted, while some have one that has grown more organically.

Other locations have almost no coordinated Twitter presence at all, which leaves users with an interest in that place to search for various combinations of the city and state name to see what’s being tweeted from/about it. Opportunities to promote a place, its attractions and its businesses are being missed.

But there’s a simple solution for this: We can all agree on a uniform way to catalog city/town related tweets that will make it easy for anyone (residents, visitors, local businesses, government leaders, the media) to find them via a Twitter search.

I suggest we all use #CityStateAbbreviation. For example, my new hometown would be #MadisonCT and my birthplace would be #BaltimoreMD. This hashtag could be added to any tweet related to local news/events that people want easily found.

In some cases the state may seem unnecessary, but it can help avoid confusion. For example, if I just used #Madison, it might take some work for searchers to determine if those tweets are related to the one in Connecticut vs. the one in Wisconsin vs. the one in New Jersey vs. the one from wherever else there might be a Madison.

This may all sound simple, but finding tweets on local events and news often requires multiple searches or following several different hashtags. Hopefully an approach like this would make local tweeting more searchable and encourage even more people to tweet local information more frequently. And this can all be done while still including whatever local hashtags are already being used in tweets but that some people may be unaware of.