We are at a point where, whether or not you use Twitter or Facebook, everyone has seen a hashtag. Every TV show has one, the Superbowl had one, even many of the Superbowl ads used them.

Now by the power vested in my by the Street of Clematis, I hereby declare that West Palm Beach has one and that it is #ilovewpb.

So now that we have settled on that, let’s talk about what a hashtag is and how we can use it.

To put it simply, hashtags are a way to group online conversations.

I documented an example of this in my blog entry called “The West Palm Beach Green Market opens to great Social Media reviews“.  The day the green market opened for the season, I saw a lot of people who were at the event posting pictures on twitter and instagram. Because there was no hashtag for the event there was no easy way to find all the pictures and tweets that people had sent out. Everyone was commenting independently, but there was no “conversation”.

Creating a hashtag creates an instant conversation on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram about a topic.

The City did a fantastic job during the holiday season with the #wpbholiday hashtag. It brought everyone who was posting pictures together to discuss our different holiday events.  But we need a hashtag that we can use throughout the year, and after seeing #ilovewpb pop up a couple times, I thought that would be a great fit.

All you have to do is add the word #ilovewpb in your message, and then anyone who searches for that will see your message. It’s just that simple.

Use the hashtag #ilovewpb when you’re posting a picture of something you love about West Palm Beach.  It could be a picture of one of our events, your trip downtown, a delicious lunch, or one of our beautiful sunrises.

Here are some of the tweets with #ilovewpb hashtags that we’ve been posting over the last few days!

Tweets about “#ilovewpb”

The great thing about having a united online presence though a hashtag  is that it lets our neighboring cities and, even better, everyone who is currently freezing up north, see what a beautiful city we have, and what a dynamic online community exists here.

If you’re already a user of Twitter go ahead and click here to use the #ilovewpb hashtag for the first time.

That’s all I have to say about that – let the hashtagging begin (just don’t go crazy like these guys)!