Hashtag usage has significantly grown on social media over the last few years. Many brands create custom hashtags for certain campaigns, making it easier to keep all relevant posts and conversations grouped together. They are particularly important on Instagram and X (formerly Twitter), providing a straightforward way to group similar types of content together.
Hashtag tracking tools help you discover popular and relevant hashtags. They show the popularity of certain hashtags over time. Unfortunately, most of the best hashtag tracking tools aren’t entirely free, although most offer some free trial. However, there are free tools that can help you, depending on your exact needs. Even X (Twitter) offers a robust hashtag search system to assist you in hashtag discovery.
Tracking and finding the best hashtags can be a challenge without expensive paid tools. However, it is possible with a combination of these free tools, combined with organized systems.
If you are serious about tracking hashtags, it is worthwhile trying a few tools first, to find the ones that best meet your needs. This includes using any free trials of the paid products.
1. Digimind – An Onclusive Company
Digimind leads globally in AI-powered social listening and market intelligence. A standout feature is the analysis of hashtags, allowing you to categorize messages by user preference and location.
The recent Social Listening Solution integrates Digimind AI Sense and OpenAI ChatGPT. AI Sense tracks digital content, extracting key events and hashtags for brands and topics. ChatGPT summarizes this data in plain language. Digimind’s AI provides the reason for the hashtag peak without the fluff.
Key Features:
- Brand Listening: Monitor real-time conversations about your brand using hashtags, gaining invaluable insights to enhance your marketing strategy.
- Online Reputation Insights: Utilize key hashtags to explore your brand image beyond social networks, including Google search behavior. Stay updated in real-time on your customers’ interests regarding your brand, products, people, and competitors.
- User-Generated Content Analysis: Capture all discussions about your marketing campaigns by targeting specific hashtags and related ones.
Pricing:
- Free Trial: Unspecified
- Pricing Tiers: Unspecified
- Paid Subscription Features: Unspecified
Channels:
Facebook, Salesforce, Google Data Studio, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Teams.
2. Brand24
Brand24 is a cutting-edge social media monitoring tool boasting AI-powered reports and insights. It equips you with the ability to keep tabs on your brand’s online presence, gain valuable customer insights, enhance your social customer service, and keep a close eye on your competitors. Additionally, Brand24 offers comprehensive hashtag tracking and analytics services, harnessing the power of hashtags and identifying influential profiles.
Key Features:
- Comprehensive Analytics: Monitor hashtags across various platforms like X and Instagram and easily track trending hashtags with volume charts.
- Hashtag Alerts: Receive instant notifications for changes in hashtag performance, including viral trends.
- Influencer Monitoring: Identify micro-influencers, influential social media profiles, and authors who use your hashtags, enhance their social media reach, and foster collaboration.
- Most Active Authors: Discover the social media profiles that frequently use your hashtags to offer potential collaboration opportunities.
Pricing:
- Free Trial: Available for 14 days
- Pricing Tiers: From $79 (Individual) to $399 (Enterprise) per month
- Paid Subscription Features: unlimited users, hourly and real-time updates, advanced AI features, tracking hashtags on social media platforms, news, blogs, reviews, forums, and more
Channels:
Slack, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Spotify, Telegram, Reddit, TikTok, X (Twitter), Medium, Quora, YouTube, Twitch, Blogger, Google News, Yahoo News, Bing News.
3. Iconosquare
Iconosquare redefines hashtag tracking with real-time social media listening through Bubble and Avatar, enabling you to monitor competitors and trending hashtags, providing actionable insights for decision-making. But Iconosquare is more than a hashtag tracker; it is an analytics, management, and social media scheduling software solution.
Iconosquare’s hashtag tracking tool can also track 9M hashtags and 840k mentions, ensuring you stay on top of social conversations. In the Listening tab, you’ll find a detailed breakdown of the tags, mentions you’ve received, and information about the media type.
Key Features:
- Industry Benchmarking: Access critical KPIs such as average follower growth rate, average post engagement rate, and average engagement rate on reach. Easily compare your performance with others in your industry.
- Hashtag Insights: Choose your hashtags and gain comprehensive analytics for each on a single page.
- Automated Monthly Reports: Schedule monthly reports to monitor your competitors’ evolution.
Pricing:
- Free Trial: Available for 14 days
- Pricing Tiers: Starts at $29/mo.
- Paid Subscription Features: From one to unlimited users, 12 to unlimited data retention, tailored onboarding and training, live chat support
Channels:
Instagram, Facebook, X (Twitter), LinkedIn, TikTok, Capterra, AgencyAnalytics.
4. Agorapulse
Agorapulse is a comprehensive social media management tool covering publishing, engagement, monitoring, and reporting. Its integrated tool simplifies tracking using a robust suite of hashtag tools to meet all your tracking needs. You can conduct searches that involve multiple hashtags while specifying language and location preferences. Moreover, Agorapulse conveniently links hashtag results to the profiles responsible for each tweet.
Key Features:
- Track Any Hashtag: Set up hashtag searches for any term or phrase on Instagram, X, and YouTube. You can also interact with related content directly from your dashboard.
- Hashtag Reports: Access a list of used key phrases within a specified time frame and interaction counts to identify high-engagement hashtags, ensuring an effective connection with your target audience.
- Listening Reports: Provides daily tallies for your hashtag searches, helping you assess popularity trends, evaluate campaign success, and pinpoint the most effective trending terms for your accounts.
- Hashtag Groups: Easily save and reuse preset groups of hashtags for your social media posts.
Pricing:
- Free Trial: Available for 30 days; includes three social profiles for one user, basic social inbox, limited social media ROI report, and 10 scheduled posts
- Pricing Tiers: starts at $49 per month (Standard)
- Paid Subscription Features: post scheduling, unlimited posts, content queues, advanced spam management, advanced ad comments monitoring, white-label reporting, multiple integrations, automated inbox assistant, and more
Channels:
Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, X (Twitter), Canva, TikTok, LinkedIn, Meta for Business, Google Analytics, Google Business Profile.
5. Flick
Flick is an impressive tool that can help you find and analyze hashtags to get the best strategy. It can also help you find relevant and trendy hashtags to the suitable extension for your niche. Flick’s hashtag tracker simplifies the process for Instagram creators, brands, and marketers to monitor their current hashtag strategies.
Key Features:
- Instagram Optimization: Gain deep insights into your hashtag performance, including impressions, ranking distributions, and trending hashtags. Receive smart recommendations to enhance your strategy.
- Access Anywhere: Flick is available on desktop, iOS, and Android, ensuring you can track hashtags and view analytics on the go, as long as you have Wi-Fi or a cellular network.
- Top Post Monitoring: Flick utilizes Instagram’s API to continuously track the top posts of your chosen hashtags and monitor your content’s position in the feed over time.
Pricing:
- Free Trial: Available for 7 days
- Pricing Tiers: Starts at $13.60/mo.
- Paid Subscription Features: link 4 to 20 social profiles, schedule unlimited posts, track unlimited Instagram posts, advanced search filters, advanced hashtag metrics, and more
Channels:
Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, X (Twitter), Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, Buffer.
6. YouScan
YouScan.io is a social media analysis tool. Unlike much of the competition, it includes image analysis. YouScan, although not explicitly highlighting hashtag tracking on its website, offers all standard features of social media listening. This naturally encompasses tracking mentions of selected hashtags.
One way you can find the most important content in your YouScan message streams is to use their auto-categories. Auto-categories help you pick out the most relevant information from a large stream of mentions. YouScan automatically sorts mentions by categories with the help of machine learning. One auto-category is Captions, which picks up hashtags in Instagram captions.
Key Features:
- Hashtag Analytics: Gain in-depth insights into your hashtags, enabling you to comprehend their performance and effectiveness.
- Influencer Discovery: Analyze hashtag usage to identify influential social media profiles capable of expanding the reach of your hashtags.
- Hashtag Performance Alerts: Receive real-time notifications from YouScan concerning shifts in your hashtag performance, ensuring you stay informed when your hashtags gain traction.
Pricing:
- Free Trial: Available (duration unspecified)
- Pricing Tiers: Starts at $299/mo.
- Paid Subscription Features: unlimited users, unlimited alerts, unlimited social searches, full coverage of supported platforms, ChatGPT-powered Insights Copilot
Channels:
Instagram, Facebook, X (Twitter), LinkedIn, TikTok.
7. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo can be an invaluable tool for discovering “what’s the buzz” on social media. You can use it to analyze what content performs best for any topic or competitor. You can search for specific hashtags to see how popular they have been across various social channels. If you enter a hashtag in their Content Analyzer, BuzzSumo lists the social posts where they most frequently appear. As you key in hashtags, BuzzSumo will provide related suggestions.
BuzzSumo also offers brand monitoring, where you can track your brand mentions, the impact of your competitors’ content, who is linking to you, and monitor your progress over time. You can use this to track the success of your custom hashtags and whether people are using them across the social web.
Key Features:
- Comprehensive Monitoring with Hashtags: Precisely monitor mentions, trends, and updates on all social media platforms. Pinpoint fresh opportunities, maintain a competitive edge, and manage your reputation securely.
- Competitive Intelligence: Monitor competitor mentions and content for strategic advantage. Gain insights into your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses and unearth new prospects to set your brand apart.
- Keyword Alerts with Hashtags: Set up alerts for topics, brands, keywords, and hashtags that influence your business, keeping you well-informed and ready to take action.
Pricing:
- Free Trial: Available for 30 days
- Pricing Tiers: From $159/mo. to $999/mo.
- Paid Subscription Features: one to 30 users, unlimited searches, 2 to 50 alerts, coverage reports, trending feeds, Slack integration, YouTube analyzer, article uploads, and more
Channels:
Facebook, X (Twitter), Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Buffer, Slack, Reddit, Pinterest.
8. BrandMentions
BrandMentions is a data-driven tool that scours the internet to provide insights on hashtags and brands. This suite features a real-time hashtag tracking tool offering detailed reports on impressions, reach, and post counts for each hashtag. It incorporates sentiment analysis to help you gauge the tone of conversations, whether positive or negative, across the web and social media.
Key Features:
- Track Hashtag Performance Over Time: Monitor the performance of your hashtag over time. Evaluate its usage, impressions, and sharing frequency. This data aids in gauging the effectiveness of your hashtag campaign and making necessary adjustments.
- Identify Top Influencers: Identify the key influencers using your hashtag. This information is valuable for your hashtag campaign’s potential partnerships and collaboration opportunities.
- New Target Groups: Uncover new target groups interested in your hashtag. This information supports expanding your reach and finding potential customers.
Pricing:
- Free Trial: Available for 7 days with demo and live chat for assistance
- Pricing Tiers: From $79/mo. to $399/mo.
- Paid Subscription Features: 15 to 50 keywords, 5K to 100K mentions, daily, real-time updates, one month to ten years of historical data, customizable reports
Channels:
Slack, RSS Feeds, Webhooks, Zappier, Microsoft Teams, Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Buffer.
9. Talkwalker Analytics
Talkwalker is a comprehensive social media search, monitoring, and analytics tool. It provides insights and metrics for both owned and earned media performance. You can effortlessly follow your campaigns and hashtags with the free Hashtag Tracking IQ App. This app enables you to monitor hashtag performance across 10+ social networks and 150 million websites, blogs, and forums. Additionally, it offers real-time hashtag tracking across all social media and online channels.
Key Features:
- Real-Time Hashtag Tracking: Monitor hashtags across all social media and online channels. Assess the success of your hashtag campaigns with various tracking metrics, including mentions, engagement, and reach.
- Benchmark Against Competitors: Compare your hashtag performance to that of competitors and identify trending themes. Evaluate top-performing posts for increased engagement insights.
- Discover Channels and Influencers: Identify the right channels and influencers to enhance your hashtag success. Access comprehensive X (Twitter) hashtag tracking and uncover the best hashtags across all platforms.
Pricing:
- Free Trial: Unspecified, but a free demo is available
- Pricing Tiers: Unspecified
- Paid Subscription Features: unlimited users, industry-leading social listening and media mentoring, custom reports and alerts, pre-built use case dashboards, social benchmarking, Blue Silk AI
Channels:
X (Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Google Analytics 360, Tableau, Hootsuite, Meta for Business, Trustpilot.
10. Keyhole
Keyhole is designed to analyze your campaign’s hashtag conversation, enabling you to measure and share performance instantly. Its hashtag tracker accurately monitors hashtags on various social networks within one dashboard. This makes it effortless to measure and demonstrate the real-time impact of your campaigns, events, and influencers with swift reporting.
Keyhole’s hashtag analytics tool provides real-time metrics on any hashtag you can think of. Most importantly, it will help you measure your social media campaign performance to help prove the impact and ROI of your campaigns.
Key Features:
- Multi-Network Hashtag Tracking: Monitor hashtag performance across various social networks from a single dashboard.
- Real-Time Impact Measurement: Instantly measure the impact of hashtag campaigns, events, and influencers, providing valuable insights for campaign assessment and adjustments.
- Comprehensive Social Insights: Gain in-depth insights from your social data, including trending hashtags, influencer usage, and competitor comparisons.
Pricing:
- Free Trial: Available for 7 days
- Pricing Tiers: From $63/mo. to $833/mo.
- Paid Subscription Features: From 5 to 50 social profiles, one to six months history on new profiles, two to 25 keyword trackers, 5K to 50K mentions per month, Quick Trends access
Channels:
Facebook, Instagram, X (Twitter), TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, Google Analytics, Salesforce, HubSpot.
11. Twitter Search
X Advanced Search is a versatile tool for hashtag tracking. To search for specific hashtags, you’ll have to conduct manual searches for each term and tally the usage counts. You can search for tweets containing a specific hashtag and apply a date filter to track its usage over time. This is valuable for monitoring hashtag campaign performance and identifying trends. Additionally, you can search for tweets with a specific hashtag and then sort the results by the number of retweets, replies, or likes. This helps in pinpointing influential users discussing a particular topic.
The advanced X search tool is not accessible directly through X (Twitter)’s mobile app. However, you can still access it via your phone’s web browser.
Key Features:
- Sentiment Tracking: Locate tweets with a specific hashtag and apply the keyword filter to discover specific words or phrases. This is valuable for gauging public sentiment on a particular topic.
- Popular Hashtag Identification: Find tweets with a specific keyword and employ the hashtag filter to identify the hashtags used in those tweets. This helps you discover new hashtags for your own tweets or ones relevant to your target audience.
- Hashtag Filtering: Refine search results by filtering them by hashtag, focusing on tweets containing a specific hashtag.
Pricing:
Free
Channels:
N/A
12. TweetDeck (X Pro)
TweetDeck, rebranded to X (Twitter)Pro, is a paid social media dashboard for managing multiple X (Twitter) accounts. Originally an independent app, X (Twitter) Inc. later acquired it and integrated it into the app’s interface. X (Twitter)Pro simplifies the task of monitoring and interacting with your followers through features like saved searches, scheduled tweets, and analytics.
Starting in August 2023, X (Twitter)Pro transitioned into a paid platform, necessitating a subscription for continued usage.
Key Features:
- Full Post Composer: Offers a complete post composer for creating threaded posts with media and scheduling, perfect for diverse content in hashtag campaigns.
- Advanced Search: Provides advanced search to quickly find specific content, ideal for tracking hashtag usage and impact.
- New Column Types: Introduces intuitive column creation, including in-column search for real-time hashtag monitoring.
Pricing:
- Free Trial: N/A
- Pricing Tiers: Starts at $8/mo.
- Paid Subscription Features: edit and undo tweets, fewer ads, longer posts, dedicated columns for hashtag tracking, analytics access
Channels:
X (Twitter), Buffer, Hootsuite, Google Analytics, Zapier.
13. Social Searcher
Social Searcher is a data-driven tool for businesses to track brands through analytics data, audience insights, sentiment analysis, and more. It helps you oversee public social mentions across social networks and the web. With this tool, you can efficiently gauge and follow conversations about your company, brand, product, or service on a user-friendly dashboard, saving you valuable time while enhancing your online presence tracking.
Key Features:
- Premium Actionable Social Analytics: Analyze content performance on various platforms with charts and reports, gaining insights into your hashtag campaigns.
- Popular Hashtags: Discover top hashtags on Instagram, X, and other networks engaging potential customers to help you integrate trending hashtags into your marketing strategy.
- Sentiment Analysis: Identifies and addresses negative feedback to mitigate its viral impact, particularly valuable when monitoring sentiment around specific hashtags.
Pricing:
- Free Trial: Available for 14 days
- Free Subscription: Available with limited services (2 email alerts, 100 real-time searches/day)
- Pricing Tiers: From €3.49/mo. to €19.49/mo.
- Paid Subscription Features: 200 to 800 real-time searches/day, 3 to 10 email alerts, 3 to 10 monitoring, 3K to 100K saved posts/month
Channels:
Facebook, X (Twitter), YouTube, Instagram, Reddit, Tumblr, Flickr, Dailymotion, Vimeo.
14. #Onemilliontweetmap
The #OneMillionTweetMap is a live map that continuously updates to display the latest one million tweets. It operates through Maptimize, an online map tool designed for clustering and analyzing extensive geolocated data. This map allows data-focused professionals to monitor worldwide X discussions, observe trending topics, and identify popular hashtags.
Key Features:
- Real-time Visualization: Offers a live display of tweets worldwide, focusing on the last 24 hours.
- Cluster View: Easily pinpoint the areas with the highest tweet activity, with a red point marking the latest tweet.
- Keyword/Hashtag Search: Employ keyword and hashtag filters for precise searches related to your chosen topic and location.
- Time Filter: Select data from the past six hours.
- Sentiment View: Utilize an interactive map to track real-time sentiment, categorizing tweets as positive, neutral, or negative.
Pricing:
Free
Channels:
X (Twitter), Maptimize, Google Analytics.
15. All Hashtag
All Hashtag is a free online hashtag generator tool for social media professionals. It’s your go-to source for discovering the most relevant hashtags for your posts. With user-friendly features and language versatility, it caters to your specific preferences. Notably, All Hashtag’s analytic tool lets you dissect your chosen hashtag. You can gain a strategic edge for your social media content by extracting these valuable, business-oriented insights.
Key Features:
- Category Popularity: Presents a graphic illustrating how your hashtag ranks among the top hashtags in its category based on the hashtag you’re analyzing.
- Hashtag Recommendations: Analyze and track how your hashtag stacks up against others in the same category.
- Overall Popularity: Displays how your hashtag compares to the all-time best hashtags.
Pricing:
Free
Channels:
Facebook, X (Twitter), Pinterest, Instagram, TikTok, Slack.
16. Hashtagify
Hashtagify is a top X (Twitter) hashtag tracking tool designed to meet the needs of social media analytics. It is a valuable resource for identifying optimal hashtags for both X and Instagram posts. With Hashtagify, you gain access to vital information about hashtag popularity, trends, and reach, coupled with recommendations for related hashtags. Additionally, you can use this tool to monitor the performance of individual hashtags and users.
Key Features:
- Prime Trackers: Ideal for influencer marketing, it enables you to assess and measure the impact of your “sponsored” hashtag campaigns on X (Twitter), providing comprehensive reports on a specific influencer’s performance within your sample data.
- Monitor Hashtag Performance: Track and analyze your hashtag’s performance on X (Twitter), including reach, popularity, and engagement. Identify optimal posting times.
- Optimize Hashtag Marketing: Enhance your content strategy with machine learning-generated related hashtags and keywords.
Pricing:
- Free Trial: Available for 7 days
- Pricing Tiers: From $29/mo. to $399/mo.
- Paid Subscription Features: unlimited hashtag searches, real-time insights, 10 to 30 top influencers per tracked hashtag, custom add-ons
Channels:
X (Twitter), Instagram, Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Buffer.
17. Hashtracking
Hashtracking.com offers robust multi-platform reporting in both historical and real-time contexts. The real-time monitoring feature, “Track,” offers in-depth insights and customizable subscription options tailored to your needs. Originally exclusive to X (Twitter), Hashtracking now also tracks hashtags on Instagram. With Hashtracking, you can simultaneously monitor hashtags on two platforms with tabbed reports. ColorTracking on Hashtracking Instagram provides a comprehensive view.
Key Features:
- Explore Recent Data: Utilize the Hashtracking Explorer to delve into social media and generate snapshot reports of the latest data.
- Track, Share, and Store: Create, share, and store unlimited report infographics based on your tracker data. Keep your reports archived for future reference.
- Past, Present, and Future Tracking: Access detailed historical data, monitor in real-time, and never miss a post, whether from the past, present, or future.
- Identify Influencers: Our top lists extend beyond contributor lists to pinpoint key users, content, and trending topics. Ideal for influencer outreach, list creation, and content curation.
Pricing:
- Free Trial: Available for 14 days; includes 3 trackers, up to 50K X (Twitter) tweets/mo., up to 10K Instagram posts/mo., real-time analysis, and shareable reports
- Pricing Tiers: From $60/mo. to $1800/mo.
- Paid Subscription Features: from 3 up to 100 trackers, up to 3MM tweets/mo., up to 600K Instagram posts/mo., basic to moderated streaming wall, unlimited report sharing, unlimited archives
Channels:
X (Twitter), Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Hootsuite, Buffer, Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics.
18. RiteTag
RiteTag is a versatile app that offers hashtag suggestions right in your browser. It serves as a Chrome browser extension and is available as an app for both iOS and Android. The app streamlines the process of finding relevant hashtags. It automatically extracts information from your content, whether text or images, without requiring extensive input from you. RiteTag simplifies hashtag discovery for data-oriented professionals.
Key Features:
- Seamless Integration: Easily integrates with many social media scheduling apps and platforms, allowing you to insert hashtags directly into your content.
- Exceptional Hashtag Suggestions: Provides a variety of hashtags, categorizing them into trending for immediate exposure and long-term visibility.
- Intuitive: The app and browser add-on are insightful and user-friendly, requiring no extensive learning.
Pricing:
- Free Trial: Available for 7 days
- Pricing Tiers: Starts at $49/year
- Paid Subscription Features: hashtag suggestions for 1000 queries/mo. from browser extension and mobile apps
Channels:
X (Twitter), Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Hootsuite, Buffer, Loomly, Sprout Social, Google Analytics, Bitly.
19. Tagboard
Tagboard is a robust social media aggregation and display tool. It simplifies the process of tracking and curating content from multiple social media platforms in one central location. This tool is particularly noted for its hashtag tracking capabilities, enabling users to effortlessly monitor the latest posts featuring a specific hashtag, regardless of the platform they originate from.
Key Features:
- Hashtag Meter: Gauge the popularity of a hashtag across social media platforms, such as X (Twitter), Instagram, and Facebook. The Hashtag Meter also tracks post sentiment, presenting this data in a real-time graph.
- Customizable Filters: Tailor your feeds by platform, language, location, and other specific criteria with Tagboard’s customizable filters.
- Moderation: Exercise control over your feeds by concealing or removing unwanted posts using Tagboard’s moderation feature.
Pricing:
- Free Trial: Unspecified
- Pricing Tiers: Unspecified
- Paid Subscription Features: Unspecified
Channels:
X (Twitter), Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Flickr, Pinterest, Tumblr, Vimeo, Giphy, RSS Feeds, Google Analytics.
20. Hashtags.org
Hashtags.org is the go-to site for general information on hashtags. It’s most useful for finding out the top trending hashtags in different genres such as business, tech, entertainment, and more. Apart from tracking trends, Hashtag.org provides assistance on effective hashtag usage, the latest X (Twitter)-related news, and general information about the platform. Additionally, it offers decentralized hashtag names for web3 marketing, websites, wallets, and more.
Key Features:
- Central Hub: A one-stop hub for real-time trending hashtags, including breaking news under the #breaking hashtag, and popular hashtags across various genres.
- Featured Resources: Offers a wealth of resources and valuable information on effectively using and maximizing hashtags on X (Twitter) and various other social platforms.
Pricing:
- Free Trial: Unspecified
- Pricing Tiers: Starts at $49/mo.
- Paid Subscription Features: multiple hashtag trackers, comparison chart, saved views, data storage, data export, normal to premium support
Channels:
X (Twitter), Instagram, Facebook.
21. Trendsmap
Trendsmap is a real-time mapping tool that monitors X (Twitter) trends worldwide. With Trendsmap, you gain insight into what the global community is currently discussing. It plots tweets on an interactive map, offering a geographical context to trending topics. Real-time mapping shows you what people are talking about and where these discussions happen. It’s an invaluable tool for understanding global social media trends.
Key Features:
- Hashtag Analysis: Clicking on a hashtag within the map reveals straightforward analytics, including the tweet count and top tweets.
- Map Zoom Function: Zoom in and out on the map, enabling you to easily focus on trending topics in specific locations.
- Historical Hashtag Data: Using the scroll bar on the map, you can explore the popularity of hashtags for any time within the last seven days.
Pricing:
- Free Trial: Unspecified
- Pricing Tiers: From $100/mo. to $500/mo.
- Paid Subscription Features: Historical Analytics for up to ten years, unlimited queries, reports from one to up to five years of data, downloadable extracted data
Channels:
X (Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Hootsuite, Google Analytics.
22. TweetBinder
TweetBinder is a robust tool for tracking X (Twitter) hashtags and keywords, perfect for agencies and marketers. It delivers detailed hashtag analytics, including reach, engagement, sentiment, and top influencers. Additionally, it can generate historical X (Twitter) reports for trend tracking and campaign impact assessment. It also offers a comprehensive analytics tool that covers tweet volume, retweets, and more. It provides visual breakdowns of tweet types.
Key Features:
- Twitter Hashtag Analytics: Gain insights from real-time or historical X (Twitter) hashtag analytics reports and see how far your data can go.
- Comprehensive Stats: Get a full spectrum of data, including the total tweets related to your analyzed hashtag or keyword, categorized into text tweets, replies, tweets with links and pictures, and retweets.
- Economic Value: Utilize TweetBinder’s unique metric to understand the economic value of your data, revealing how much you’d need to spend to achieve the same number of tweets and impressions.
Pricing:
- Free Trial: Available for 7 days
- Free Subscription: Available (Starter Plan); limited to up to three hashtags, basic analytics, and one 1 historical report per month
- Pricing Tiers: Starts at $49/mo.
- Paid Subscription Features: track from 10 up to unlimited hashtags or keywords, advanced analytics and reporting, unlimited historical reports, access to a support team
Channels:
X (Twitter), Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Salesforce, Zoho CRM, Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics.
23. Twitter Trends tool
Don’t forget that X (Twitter) itself is a useful tool for monitoring hashtags, particularly when trying to surface emerging trends. When you log in to your X (Twitter) account, you can see trending hashtags on the left. You can change the location to check the trending hashtags or keywords in your chosen area. Because it’s an inbuilt feature, you don’t need to leave the app to know about trending hashtags and keywords. Also, when you click a trending hashtag, you can see tweets and other information with the standard X (Twitter) interface.
Key Features:
- Personalized Recommendations: “Trending For You” suggests trends based on your interests and location, ensuring you see relevant topics.
- Follow Trends: Option to follow trending topics to stay updated on subjects that interest you in your home feed.
Pricing:
Free
Channels:
N/A
24. TrackMyHashtag
TrackMyHashtag is an AI-driven X (Twitter) hashtag tracking tool, continually improving its capabilities. It fetches real-time X (Twitter) hashtag analytics, analyzes the data, and presents it on an analytics dashboard. This tool can monitor any X (Twitter) hashtag, keyword, @mention, or topic, transforming raw data into valuable, precise insights. It specializes in delivering exclusive X (Twitter) data for data-oriented professionals.
Key Features:
- Historical Hashtag Data: Access historical X (Twitter) data from 2006, providing insights into any hashtag or search term from then to the present.
- Identify Key Influencers: Discover the most influential X (Twitter) users driving hashtag campaigns and promoting your content.
- Competition Hashtag Analytics: Analyze your competitors’ activities to shape your social media marketing strategy and monitor their primary hashtags.
Pricing:
- Free Trial: Available for 5 days
- Pricing Tiers: Starts at $99/mo.; Price upon request for all-time historical data
- Paid Subscription Features: up to 25 real-time hashtag trackers, up to 200K tweets/month, chat and email support
Channels:
X (Twitter).
25. Awario
Awario is a social listening tool that gives brands access to data that matters to their business: insights on their customers, market, and competitors. Awario scans the entire web for real-time mentions of your keywords, ensuring you’re the first to discover discussions that can influence your business. It empowers you to respond promptly, staying ahead of the curve. Awario can also track keyword mentions in any language and location.
Key Features:
- Awario Leads: Discover sales opportunities in real-time by identifying posts seeking products like yours and complaints about competitors.
- Email Alerts: Stay informed effortlessly with email summaries of new mentions delivered to your inbox.
- Boolean Search: Customize your search queries using Boolean logic for more relevant results, especially when dealing with excessive mentions.
Pricing:
- Free Trial: Available (duration unspecified)
- Pricing Tiers: Starts at $29/mo.
- Paid Subscription Features: unlimited keywords per topic, 30K to 1M new mentions/mo, one to unlimited team members, data export, white-label reports
Channels:
Facebook, X (Twitter), Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Reddit, TikTok, WeChat, Weibo, Telegram, Quora, Reddit.
26. TWChat
TWChat is a free online tool chat and hashtag manager. This platform simplifies your participation in X (Twitter) chats and provides various features for managing your own chats. These include creating chat rooms, scheduling tweets, and overseeing the conversation. You can also invite users, conduct online presentations without the need for extra software, and collaborate with friends or colleagues to assist with chat moderation.
Key Features:
- Discover X (Twitter) Chats: Access a directory of upcoming and ongoing X (Twitter) chats with filters for topics, hashtags, and languages.
- Mentors: This section displays tweets from the chat’s host, guest speakers, experts, and moderators, making it easy to stay informed about announcements, chat topics, and participants.
- Engage in X (Twitter) Chats: Easily participate in X (Twitter) chats through a dedicated chat room that displays real-time chat tweets. Schedule tweets in advance and follow multiple chats concurrently.
Pricing:
Free
Channels:
X (Twitter).
27. Sprout Social
Sprout Social, a trusted partner for leading brands and agencies, offers a comprehensive suite of social media management, marketing, customer care, data and intelligence, and employee advocacy solutions. Among its array of offerings, Sprout Social provides powerful hashtag tracking tools tailored for businesses. With these tools, you can pinpoint the most effective hashtags for your social content strategy, ultimately expanding your reach and growing your audience. You can then harness the hashtags your audience already engages with to grow your social media presence.
Key Features:
- Twitter Trends Report: Discover the hashtags associated with your brand and their context, enabling data-driven decision-making.
- Hashtag Tracking in Feeds: Monitor key hashtags in your social media feeds to engage in relevant conversations.
- Outgoing and Inbound Posts: Tag your scheduled social messages with “hashtag” tags for performance analysis. Tag posts where users mention your brand with hashtags to understand their usage in communication.
Pricing:
- Free Trial: Available for 30 days
- Pricing Tiers: Starts at $249/mo.
- Paid Subscription Features: unlimited social profiles, competitive reporting, message tagging, custom workflows, scheduling, response rate analysis, trend analysis, helpdesk, CRM integration
Channels:
Facebook, X (Twitter), Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, TikTok, Google My Business, Reddit, WeChat, Tumblr, Weibo.
28. IQHashtags
IQHashtags is your AI-powered Instagram hashtag research and management tool. It finds optimal hashtags for your Instagram posts and stories, tracks their performance, and efficiently manages your hashtag strategy.
Key Features:
- AI Assistant: Quickly generate post ideas and captions.
- Hashtag Performance: Analyze which hashtags drive reach, likes, and followers, and study the relationship between posting time and engagement.
- Reels Metrics: Understand your audience’s video preferences and discover top-performing Reels hashtags.
Pricing:
- Free Trial: Available for 7 days
- Pricing Tiers: Starts at $6/mo.
- Paid Subscription Features: one to 15 social groups, unlimited tracking, banned hashtag checker
Channels:
Instagram.
29. Metricool
Metricool, a robust social media management and analytics platform, empowers both businesses and individuals to efficiently oversee their social media presence, monitor performance, and expand their audience. Among its standout features is a hashtag tracker, a tool designed to gauge the influence of hashtags and keywords on social networks while providing insights into audience behavior.
Key Features:
- Before/During/After Tracking: Monitor and measure the impact of your hashtags in events, product launches, advertising campaigns, communities, and TV programs both before, during, and after their occurrence.
- Rapid Reporting: Create customizable performance reports in PDF or PPT format within minutes, perfect for team, boss, or client presentations.
Pricing:
- Free Trial: Unspecified
- Free Subscription: Available; basic features including management of all your brand’s social media profiles (excluding LinkedIn), access to analytics with three months of historical data
- Pricing Tiers: Starts at $18/mo.
- Paid Subscription Features: management of all social media accounts, analysis of competitor profiles, downloadable reports, multiple links-in-bio, AI assistance, unlimited historical data
Channels:
X (Twitter), Instagram.
30. Taggbox
Taggbox, a UGC curation platform, offers a solution to boost user engagement, build trust, and drive conversions. It excels at tracking quality content and executing hashtag campaigns effectively. It helps you pinpoint top-performing, trending hashtags in your niche. Moreover, Taggbox is dedicated to strengthening your connection with your audience. Harness real-time hashtags to organize quizzes and competitions, encouraging audience engagement. Utilize its built-in analytics to identify winners and active users, fostering interaction and growth in your community.
Key Features:
- Hashtag Campaigns: Expand reach, engage new audiences, and build a community.
- Advanced Hashtag Analytics: Get insights into reach, impressions, engagement rate, and top contributors to enhance your hashtag campaigns.
- Hashtag Moderation: Keep your hashtag feed clean and positive by filtering out irrelevant or inappropriate content.
Pricing:
- Free Trial: Available (duration unspecified)
- Free Subscription: Available, including one widget, two feeds, 2K views/mo., five platforms, updates every 6 hours, SnapUp
- Pricing Tiers: Starts at $39/mo.
- Paid Subscription Features: minimum of three widgets, minimum of six feeds, at least 1M views/mo., minimum of 2K tweets, updates every 30 minutes, analytics access, custom CSS, ad-free
Channels:
Facebook, X (Twitter), Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest, Reddit, Vimeo, Weibo, Dailymotion, VK, SoundCloud.
31. Display Purposes
Daily Purposes is a free website that serves as a valuable tool for generating trending Instagram hashtags. It’s pretty straightforward—just input a keyword or phrase relevant to your Instagram post into the search bar. In response, Daily Purposes will furnish a list of popular hashtags ready for use. Additionally, you can filter the results based on popularity, engagement, and relevance, enabling you to fine-tune your hashtag strategy for maximum impact.
Key Features:
- Map: Explore photographic hashtags and zoom in to view local tags.
- Graph: Search for hashtags and visualize related tags in a graphic format.
- Best: Access rankings for the best hashtags based on country, city, language, gender, age, interest, and account type.
Pricing:
Free
Channels:
Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, X (Twitter).
32. Kicksta
Kicksta is a data-driven social media growth service tailored for professionals committed to organic Instagram follower growth. While its primary function is as an Instagram hashtag generator, Kicksta offers valuable hashtag tracking-related services like finding popular and relevant hashtags for your Instagram posts, measuring the impact of your hashtags, including impressions and reach.
Key Features:
- Organic Growth: Boost your brand’s visibility on Instagram by using the right hashtags, reaching a broader audience of followers.
- User Engagement: Identify and interact with users using your hashtags. Increase your visibility and connect with potential followers by liking and commenting on their posts.
Pricing:
- Free Trial: Available for 7 days
- Pricing Tiers: Starts at $69/mo.
- Paid Subscription Features: organic growth and real followers, influencer and competitor targeting, hashtag targeting, analytics dashboard, VIP email support
Channels:
Instagram.
The Impact of Effective Hashtag Monitoring on Your Brand's Reach
Hashtag tracking monitors performance across social networks, allowing you to measure and validate their impact. This ensures you only employ effective ones. A hashtag tracker monitors not only hashtags but also keywords, phrases, counts, links, and retweets/reposts. It provides valuable data for competitive research, inspiration, and audience analysis, including the select hashtags they use.
Let's look into the specific ways that efficient hashtag monitoring can boost your brand's reach:
Measure Brand Reach and Engagement
Tracking hashtags goes beyond counting views. It offers valuable insights into your social media strategy's effectiveness. By monitoring them, you understand your content's performance and how it connects with your audience. You can measure your content's reach and engagement, including those beyond your immediate followers, giving a more accurate picture of its exposure.
Source: taggbox.com
ISOLATED Talks, a mental health charity, aimed to enhance online engagement through their #Sunday7Social music event. To achieve this, they partnered with Taggbox, a user-generated content platform. They tracked hashtag use, improved content, and created targeted marketing campaigns. The result was a 46% increase in engagement and a more positive sentiment, keeping the audience returning to #Sunday7Social's playlist. This success underscores the significant impact of effective hashtag monitoring on reach and engagement.
Identify Your Audience
Hashtag monitoring reveals your content's audience. Analyzing this data unveils their demographics and preferences. This empowers you to craft resonant content. You can align your messaging, tone, and hashtags with your followers' interests.
This is especially useful with multiple campaign hashtags, as seen in WWF's We Love Cities Campaign. WWF Sweden used Keyhole's tracking feature to monitor 54 campaign hashtags. They tracked reach, engagement, and identified top posts. This data refined the campaign's resonance with the target audience.
Source: keyhole.co
Segment Your Audience
Segmenting your audience through hashtag tracking is a potent tool as it helps categorize followers based on their interests and behaviors, providing insight into various subgroups within your audience. Armed with this knowledge, you can create precise marketing campaigns tailored to each subgroup's needs, enhancing engagement and strengthening your brand's connection with your audience.
Nike offers a notable example of effective market segmentation in its social media campaigns. With multiple verified profiles across platforms, audience segmentation is vital to maximize reach. For instance, Nike Football conducted a successful market segmentation campaign on TikTok to promote its "Future Lab" boot pack.
Source: tiktok.com
This involved a Branded Hashtag Challenge, #MagicBoots, encouraging fans to showcase football tricks in Nike boots. Influential TikTok creators, including Nike Football stars, led the campaign. Users stood a chance to win boots based on their tricks. The campaign achieved massive success, with over 317 million video views, 160,000 user entries, and 46 million fan interactions.
Identify Brand Advocates and Influencers
Hashtag monitoring reveals consistent content engagers. These individuals can evolve into brand advocates or influencers, crucial for expanding your brand's reach. By recognizing and nurturing these connections, you can harness their support, extending your brand's visibility to their often substantial and engaged followers. This collaboration amplifies your message and adds credibility, enhancing your brand's impact in your target market.
Consider Calvin Klein's #MyCalvins campaign as an example. The campaign was launched on YouTube nearly a decade ago as one of the pioneers of influencer marketing efforts. Celebrities like Justin Bieber, Bella Hadid, Maluma, and Lil Nas have participated since then. The brand then opened a microsite showcasing user-generated content, helping identify their top influencers. The campaign notably boosted social media followers: 2.2 million on Facebook, 1.8 million on Instagram, and 1 million on X (Twitter). With over 920,000 Instagram posts tagged #MyCalvins, the campaign continues to generate word-of-mouth awareness and engagement.
Source: modash.io
Common Challenges in Hashtag Tracking and How to Overcome Them
Hashtags are powerful for categorizing and discovering social media content, driving traffic, and fostering brand conversations. But hashtag tracking has its challenges. Let's delve into common issues and their solutions.
Problem: Volume of Data
Popular hashtags generate massive data volumes, complicating analysis.
Solution: Utilize comprehensive platforms like Sprout Social, offering monitoring and social listening tools (e.g., hashtag monitoring, sentiment analysis, data filtering) for insights.
The Sprout Social Trends Report highlights trending topics and hashtags. It helps identify engaging people and brands, enabling quantitative and qualitative analysis. You can also set up routine data reports using Sprout Social's reporting tools. This simplifies data interpretation and sharing with your team or clients.
Another solution is to tailor Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to your business goals. For example, track how hashtag performance links to sales and brand sentiment.
Problem: Contextual Understanding
Hashtags can carry context and sarcasm, posing interpretation challenges.
Solution: The solution involves a twofold approach:
- Machine Learning Algorithms: Employ advanced algorithms to automatically gauge sentiment, context, and even detect sarcasm within hashtags. These algorithms discern shifts in sentiment and overall tone.
- Human Expertise: Augment machine learning with human experts. Analysts with expertise can delve deeper, particularly in complex scenarios, validating and enhancing algorithm-generated results.
This solution provides a nuanced grasp of hashtag context, facilitating more informed decisions and strategic refinements. Tools like MonkeyLearn provide sentiment analysis and text classification capabilities. X (Twitter) used machine learning to understand sentiment during the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election.
Problem: Privacy and Ethical Concerns
Collecting social media data raises privacy and ethical issues.
Solution: There are several interrelated solutions for this challenge:
- GDPR Compliance: To navigate data protection intricacies, strictly adhere to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Understand its principles, secure necessary consents, and ensure data is stored and transmitted securely.
- User Consent: Respect user consent by explicitly obtaining permission for data collection and usage. Use transparent consent processes and clearly communicate data utilization.
- Data Encryption: Protect collected data through robust encryption to prevent unauthorized access.
- Data Anonymization: Prioritize data anonymization to safeguard individual identities and privacy.
- Regular Audits: Conduct routine audits to ensure ongoing compliance and uphold the highest ethical data handling standards.
Platforms like Synthesio offer data privacy features. In sensitive cases like tracking #MeToo, organizations use anonymous and aggregated data to maintain privacy, unless a source wants to go public.
Problem: Spam and Irrelevant Content
Hashtag tracking can pick up spam, reducing data quality.
Solution: To address this challenge effectively, consider the following steps:
- Data Segmentation: Begin by categorizing incoming data and identifying key metrics and hashtag usage patterns.
- Filter Setup: Establish filters to exclude irrelevant or spammy content automatically. Ensure these filters effectively identify and eliminate such content to maintain data quality.
- Regular Review: Continuously evaluate filter effectiveness. Make adjustments to keep up with evolving spam tactics.
Tools like Talkwalker and Agorapulse offer content moderation and filtering. It’s also smart to learn how to find roundabout ways to prevent spam bots.
Problem: Variability in Hashtag Usage
Hashtags can vary in format, making capturing relevant mentions a challenge.
Solution: There are two solid steps to combat this challenge:
- Keyword Research: Begin by conducting comprehensive keyword research to identify the various ways a particular hashtag or keyword is used.
- Social Media Listening Tools: Employ advanced social media listening tools like Hootsuite that are capable of tracking different variations of hashtags. These tools use algorithms to identify and group similar hashtags, ensuring more comprehensive data capture.
For instance, when tracking #BlackLivesMatter, monitor #BlackLivesMatter and #BLM.
Hashtag Types to Monitor for Best Results
Dedicated hashtags simplify media monitoring. Here are the most common types:
Campaign Hashtags
Choose a creative and shareable hashtag. Ensure it's clear, easy to understand, and relevant to your brand. Example: Coca-Cola's #ShareACoke.
Brand Hashtags
Monitor these along with positive and negative keywords for sentiment analysis.
Example: Lego's #RebuildTheWorld.
Event Hashtags
Create a unique event hashtag for attendees to share experiences. Boost brand visibility and collect user-generated content.
Example: South by Southwest Festival's #SXSW
Chat Hashtags
Discover industry-specific chat hashtags through keyword searches.
Example: Hootsuite's #HootChat.
Location Hashtags
Use location-specific hashtags to reach local audiences.
Example: #SohoNY
Your Ticket to Social Media Stardom
In the vast world of social media, hashtags are your guiding stars. They lead you to essential conversations, influential trends, and your target audience. With the hashtag monitoring tools we've explored, you now have the power to navigate this landscape effectively.
Understanding tracking's impact on your brand, addressing challenges, and leveraging solutions are integral to this journey. We've examined common hashtags and their effects. Now it's your turn to dive into the world of hashtag monitoring for your brand.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you track hashtag performance?
In this article, we have looked at many tools you can use to track hashtag performance. Hashtag tracking tools help you find popular, relevant hashtags. They show the trends in hashtag usage over time. The best tools cost you money, although there are free hashtag tools that may do enough to meet your needs. If you need to find information about a few hashtags on a one-off basis, a free trial of one of the pay products may give you all you require.
How can you tell if a hashtag is popular?
Depending on the social network you're using, any of the hashtag tracking tools in this article should be able to give you an idea of whether a hashtag is popular. Each tool uses a different method to show popular hashtags. For example, All Hashtag includes Top Hashtags that suggests hashtags currently performing well and are most popular. Buzzsumo lets you search for specific hashtags to see their popularity across social channels.
How do hashtags gain followers?
Although a hashtag isn't a social media user, you can follow them on both Twitter and Instagram. Twitter includes a Follow button on hashtag pages. This gives you a way to collate a series of tweets and see new tweets on the topic in real-time. Likewise, to follow a hashtag on Instagram, tap on your chosen hashtag, and then tap Follow. From then on, you will see photos and videos about that topic in your feed.
Are 30 hashtags too many?
For any social network other than Instagram, 30 hashtags would always be too many – imagine trying to fit 30 hashtags into your 280-character tweets. Instagram, however, is more lenient to large-scale hashtag use and accepts up to 30 hashtags per post. However, just because you can use 30 hashtags on Instagram doesn't mean you should. There are mixed views about this. However, the consensus is that 11 hashtags are the optimum number. And change them every post to be relevant to the content.
Do hashtags increase followers?
The main advantage of using hashtags is to increase the reach of your posts. If you make an eye-catching, exciting post on a particular topic on Instagram, for instance, and don't use hashtags, you are limiting the reach of your posts to your followers (unless Instagram places it in people's Explore pages). If you use some relevant popular hashtags, however, then you gain a whole new audience (people who search for those hashtags), some of whom will like your posts and follow you for more.
How do you measure hashtag reach?
Many of the tools we have covered in this article give a useful indication of a hashtag's reach. A hashtag's reach is the number of people who have potentially seen posts that have used the hashtag on a particular social network. For example, if you invented a new hashtag and used it in a post, then the hashtag reach would be your follower number until somebody else used it. Marketers take a keen interest in hashtag reach of custom hashtags created for specific marketing campaigns.
