Twitter is growing, and growing fast. If you currently use the service you have experienced this first hand. A year ago popular “Tweeps” may have had a few hundred followers. Today, many users are crossing the hundred thousand threshold and a few have achieved the million follower mark.

Businesses have begun the migration as well by creating customer service accounts and marketing accounts. Even executives are tweetin’ away!

The deeper you dive into the Twitterverse the more difficult it is to manage. Twitter is a powerful business tool, but has very limited features. But don’t worry. There are a plethora of FREE tools that can manage your Twitter account and exponentially extend the reach of your Twitter campaigns.

I’ve compiled a list of features, apps, tools, and strategies to use in conjunction in order to get your message out to targeted individuals.

Hashtag, Trends, and Tools

The Feature:
If you use Twitter, you’ve seen #’s. This is called a ‘hashtag’. The hashtag is a way for people to arrange their tweets into searchable categories. To create a hashtag, all you need to do is type #whateveryouwant.

Rule: No spaces, punctuation, or special characters permitted.

The Example:
Let’s say I’m watching Lost and decide to tweet about it. I could write the following:

OMG! I can’t believe Juliet set off the bomb! #lost

This gives other Lost fans, who are roaming Twitter, the ability to find my tweet regardless if they are following me. This is a great way to find people who have similar interests. If enough people tweet using the same hashtag it becomes a trend.

http://search.twitter.com is Twitter’s search tool that searches hashtags and shows current popular trends.

So... how do businesses use this? The real benefit for businesses is that hashtags are aggregated into ‘trends’. As a professional, create a hashtag regarding your company, your product, or your industry and place it at the end of your tweet. This is a powerful way to monitor what people are saying about you, your product, or industry.

As you consistently use these hashtags at the end of each of your tweets, it will eventually develop into a trend. This process is compounded as others re-tweet your messages and adopt your hashtag.

An alternative approach is find a popular trend related to your industry and start incorporating it into your tweets. Immediately, your messages will be placed at the forefront of those following that trend.

The Tools:
“Ok. I’m using hashtags now, but there are several other hashtags and trends that I’d like to follow. Using http://search.twitter.com only allows me to use to view them one at a time. Any way of monitoring multiple hashtags?”

I’m glad you asked! Monitter provides columns to monitor 3 hashtags in real time. This free sitealso provides a filter by location. This is a great way to find new people who are specific to your industry or area. Follow them, send them a reply, or check out what they have to say.

Three isn’t enough? TweetGrid is a site that allows you to track up to 9 hashtags in real time.

As somebody who works in the CRM, SCRM, and Sales 2.0 industry I follow #crm, #scrm, and #sales20 on these services.

TweetLater is another great tool that compiles a list of all the twitter-ers who used certain terms or hashtags that are important to your business. It then e-mails them to you to sort through at your convenience. This is a easy way to find desired contacts at your leisure.

Of course there are a myriad of other tools that can assist you in monitoring trends, but this is enough to get started. If you are interested in other hashtag tools, check out Mashable's list of 15 trend tracking sites.

Please comment with your hashtag strategies and tools!