Published by HerCampus – November 17, 2011
Northeastern students are always looking for new way to claim king over cross-town rivals at Boston University. While not to start the battle of the best between the schools, Northeastern can easily claim another feat that BU can’t: we were a Boston trending topic on Twitter.
This Tuesday, Northeastern clenched this landmark as tweets about our men’s basketball team’s win in overtime at Southern Illinois, an incident involving Boston Police Department on campus and the wildfire spread of a student made parody music video launched the Northeastern hashtag above world-wide-trending-topic Kate Middleton as a trending topic in the Boston area.
Hold up. What’s a trending topic? A hash-what? Why should I care? Twitter has quickly become one of the fastest sources of communication, in the simplest form. Limited to 140 characters, tweets deliver punctual and to the point information to everyone with access to the Internet.
According to techcrunch.com, Twitter has 145 million registered accounts that collectively send 90 million tweets a day, which translates to a lot of messages but also a lot of eyes seeing that concise message. In a world where time is money, the faster, the better and this is where Twitter steps up to bat and hits a homerun.
Twitter has formulated its own lingo: tweets, retweets, at-tags, hashtags, trending topics – the list goes on. Hashtags can range from keywords to be found in a search, like #northeastern, to clever sayings and prompts to begin or end a tweet like #thingswomendontdoanymore or #haveyouever (both Boston area trending topics on Tuesday).
Then come the trending topics. Trending topics translate to what the Twitter world is talking about at that given second of the day. Trends can be sorted by location, from world-wide, to country to specific cities. Topics trend based on frequency of appearance within tweets. Making the trending topics list isn’t an easy feat. It takes numerous tweeters to use the exact same spelling and combination of words in a certain amount of time.
Now, back my story. Enter Northeastern:
On the Boston trending topics list, #northeastern rose up from the bottom of the list to fourth, surpassing Prince William’s bride-to-be Kate Middleton as our men’s basketball team represented us well in Illinois taking an overtime 63-62 win over Southern Illinois University Carbondale, as part of ESPN’s College Hoops Marathon.
Tweets calling the game, celebrating with win and discuss SIU’s loss were hashtagged #northeastern either within the tweet or at the end. These tweets began to overlap with the reports that the Boston Police Department was on campus with yellow police tape blocking off a section of sidewalk between residence halls and classroom buildings. (Those in surrounding buildings were assured there was nothing to be worried about.)
Then, a music video parody of Jay Z’s Empire State of Mind, titled “Northeastern State of Mind” hit Facebook. As shares and likes increase on Facebook and YouTube views skyrocketed, it was only a matter of time before it hit Twitter.
And, did it. Tweets and retweets with the direct links to the YouTube video were full of references both from the video and encouraging words of its creativity and awesomeness. Not only was I tweeting about it, but everyone was. Literally. Including BostonTweet, and those Bostonian tweeters know that if BostonTweet tweets it, it’s pretty legit.
As the afternoon turned to night, tweets from the Northeastern community continued as we rejoiced about being a trending topic, showing our school spirit and ability to rally together when the times are tough or to keep #Northeastern trending.