If you didn’t catch Comedy Central’s roast of Donad Trump that aired on March 15, you not only missed the customary jabs at Trump’s signature hair and his love for making money, you also missed the other star of the night – the #TrumpRoast hashtag at the bottom of the screen. This hashtag was the most obvious integration of Twitter and television to date, and resulted in amazingly high participation.

Whenever you weren’t being prompted to join the conversation on Twitter, you were staring at the hashtag on the bottom left side of the screen. The people over at Twitter tracked the usage of the hashtag over the course of the 90-minute show. The hashtag was used about 35,000 times during the roast, averaging about 6.5 tweets per second (TPS). This only covers the use of #TrumpRoast, and excludes any mention of the show without the hashtag, meaning the level of Twitter buzz was probably much higher.

Uniting everyone under one hashtag let Comedy Central more accurately track their impact on Twitter and the effectiveness of their ploy. While this is the most obvious use of a hashtag on television, the TPS rate didn’t even approach those during the 2011 Super Bowl, which got as high as 4,064 tweets per second. This isn’t surprising, though given the broader viewership the Super Bowl enjoys.

With Comedy Central giving its viewers something to do during the commercials other than using the bathroom, I have to say the inclusion of an official Twitter hashtag is a good idea. Fans love to interact with each other, and the ability to comment on an event and see what other people are saying only makes them feel more active in the program. It’s also great advertising, too. I didn’t catch the roast until about halfway through the show, and I only tuned in because I saw it was trending on Twitter. Comedy Central’s hashtag experiment can be said to be a success – and an example of the type of business move even Donald Trump would approve of.

[Image Credit: Comedy Central]