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. Brand24
Channels: Slack, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Spotify, Telegram, Reddit, TikTok, X (Twitter), Medium, Quora, YouTube, Twitch, Blogger, Google News, Yahoo News, Bing News.
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.
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2. Flick
Channels: Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, X (Twitter), Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, Buffer.
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.
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3. Metricool
Channels: X (Twitter), Instagram.
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.
Read More4. YouScan
Channels: Instagram, Facebook, X (Twitter), LinkedIn, TikTok.
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.
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5. BuzzSumo
Channels: Facebook, X (Twitter), Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Buffer, Slack, Reddit, Pinterest.
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.
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6. Talkwalker Analytics
Channels: X (Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Google Analytics 360, Tableau, Hootsuite, Meta for Business, Trustpilot.
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.
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7. Digimind – An Onclusive Company
Channels: Facebook, Salesforce, Google Data Studio, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Teams.
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.
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8. Agorapulse
Channels: Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, X (Twitter), Canva, TikTok, LinkedIn, Meta for Business, Google Analytics, Google Business Profile.
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.
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9. BrandMentions
Channels: Slack, RSS Feeds, Webhooks, Zappier, Microsoft Teams, Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Buffer.
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.
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10. Keyhole
Channels: Facebook, Instagram, X (Twitter), TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, Google Analytics, Salesforce, HubSpot.
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.
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11. Twitter Search
Pricing: Free
Channels: N/A
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.
Read More12. TweetDeck (X Pro)
Channels: X (Twitter), Buffer, Hootsuite, Google Analytics, Zapier.
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.
Read More13. Social Searcher
Channels: Facebook, X (Twitter), YouTube, Instagram, Reddit, Tumblr, Flickr, Dailymotion, Vimeo.
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.
Read More14. Twubs
Twubs helps you monitor hashtag performance and join Twitter chats related to particular hashtags. You can just enter a hashtag and begin monitoring conversations using the tag. You can post messages directly using your selected hashtags.
You can even register a customized hashtag on Twubs. Registration provides you with a record of your claim that you can use in any trademark or other legal challenge. Twubs’ free registration also exposes the primary information about your hashtag in a format optimized for search engines, helping your SEO. Twubs makes it easier to find your hashtag, and collect all its uses together in one customizable feed.
Read More15. #Onemilliontweetmap
Pricing: Free
Channels: X (Twitter), Maptimize, Google Analytics.
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.
Read More16. All Hashtag
Pricing: Free
Channels: Facebook, X (Twitter), Pinterest, Instagram, TikTok, Slack.
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.
Read More17. Hashtagify
Channels: X (Twitter), Instagram, Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Buffer.
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.
Read More18. Hashtracking
Channels: X (Twitter), Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Hootsuite, Buffer, Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics.
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.
Read More19. RiteTag
Channels: X (Twitter), Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Hootsuite, Buffer, Loomly, Sprout Social, Google Analytics, Bitly.
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.
Read More20. Tagboard
Channels: X (Twitter), Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Flickr, Pinterest, Tumblr, Vimeo, Giphy, RSS Feeds, Google Analytics.
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.
Read More21. Hashtags.org
Channels: X (Twitter), Instagram, Facebook.
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.
Read More22. Sprout Social
Channels: Facebook, X (Twitter), Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, TikTok, Google My Business, Reddit, WeChat, Tumblr, Weibo.
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.
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23. Trendsmap
Channels: X (Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Hootsuite, Google Analytics.
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.
Read More24. TweetBinder
Channels: X (Twitter), Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Salesforce, Zoho CRM, Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics.
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.
Read More25. Twitter Trends tool
Pricing: Free
Channels: N/A
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.
Read More26. TrackMyHashtag
Channels: X (Twitter).
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.
Read More27. Awario
Channels: Facebook, X (Twitter), Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Reddit, TikTok, WeChat, Weibo, Telegram, Quora, Reddit.
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.
Read More28. TWChat
Pricing: Free
Channels: X (Twitter).
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.
Read More29. Listen
Listen is a Twitter analytics platform. To say it’s a powerful tool almost feels like an understatement. Take its access to Twitter’s archive. This feature allows you to explore a topic that was covered at any point in Twitter’s history. It also offers a visualization of your data, and the option to export it for analysis.
Real-time updates are valuable and Union Metrics offers real-time monitoring of your tweets to help understand how your brand is doing on Twitter. You’re able to unpack key metrics like post reach and explore more advanced functionality like sentiment analysis for each hashtag.
Read More30. IQHashtags
Channels: Instagram.
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
31. Taggbox
Channels: Facebook, X (Twitter), Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest, Reddit, Vimeo, Weibo, Dailymotion, VK, SoundCloud.
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.
Read More32. Display Purposes
Pricing: Free
Channels: Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, X (Twitter).
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.
Read More33. Iconosquare
Channels: Instagram, Facebook, X (Twitter), LinkedIn, TikTok, Capterra, AgencyAnalytics.
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.
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34. Kicksta
Channels: Instagram.
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.
Read MoreThe 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
