With Twitter, Instagram and Facebook analytics lacking the capacity to monitor hashtag performance, hashtag tracking tools are becoming more and more popular these days. If you’re into social media marketing, let’s have a look at free hashtag tracking tools.
Hashtag analytics may come in handy on a couple of occasions:
- To measure the social media reach of your hashtag campaign and its mentions
- To measure social media engagement around your hashtag
- To discover social media sentiment around a hashtag
- To track the social media reach of your brand hashtag
- To measure the results of a marketing campaign
- To spot top influencers that mention your hashtag
- To learn who and where shares your content
- To measure the performance of hashtag marketing campaign
- To spot trending hashtags and discover hashtag suggestions
There’s plenty of tools to monitor hashtag performance. In this blog post, we’ll discuss the best tools for hashtag tracking.
- RiteTag
- Keyhole
- Hashtagify
- Twubs
- Awario
- TrackMyHashtag
- TweetDeck
- Talkwalker
- All Hashtag
The Analysis tab inside the tool holds plenty of data that presents you with a better context around your hashtags.
Some of the most important metrics you should focus on are:
- The volume of mentions
- Social media reach of a hashtag
- The volume of engagement
- Sentiment analysis around a hashtag
- Other popular hashtags
- Context of discussion
The number of mentions and their social media reach is represented by two charts. All mentions land inside the dashboard, in your inbox, a Slack channel, or inside the mobile app.
you can monitor the engagement the mentions of your hashtag generate, including comments, likes, and shares.
It’s a great way to track the performance of your marketing campaigns on Twitter and Instagram.
The most active and influential mentions give you an opportunity to identify people who use your hashtag the most. Are there any influential social media users talking about your hashtag or brand? Has an influential website been talking about your hashtag campaign?
To share the insights, you can prepare custom reports. This data will be invaluable for your social media managers. You can improve your social media content and reach your target audience more effectively.
RiteTag
Another awesome hashtag analytics tool that lets you monitor hashtag performance is RiteTag which is a part of RiteKit. It’s a great tool for monitoring what hashtags are currently trending on Twitter and Instagram.
RiteTag provides plenty of data, including Estimated Hourly Statistics, Daily Averages, popular accounts using a hashtag and more. The tool also suggests trending hashtags that increase discoverability and exposure, tells which hashtags get seen over time and which hashtags are becoming less popular. It’s a really in-depth hashtag tracker
The tool has also a browser extension that indicates if hashtags you want to use are trending, have some potential, or not at all.
Keyhole
Keyhole is a social media analytics tool that gives the opportunity to monitor hashtag performance and hashtag analytics on Twitter and Instagram. The tool provides plenty of data, including reach, the number of posts, users, impressions, and more.
Keyhole also has account-level analytics and the Optimization feature that analyzes hashtag performance of a given account. It’s a good way to find out if relevant hashtags work in terms of engagement. What’s more, the tool suggests how to improve your post strategy, optimize post length, and timing.
You can also look for trending hashtags to boost your content engagement.
What’s quite convenient is that in Keyhole the most related hashtags are represented as a tag cloud. It clearly presents the bigger picture.
Hashtagify
Similarly to RiteTag, Hashtagify lets you discover the most trending hashtags and other, relevant hashtags. There are not many free hashtag monitoring tools out there, but Hashtagify is certainly one of them.
In the basic mode, Hashtagify presents relevant hashtags in a bubble. By hovering over a hashtag, the tool displays data about popularity and correlation from the main hashtag. There’s also the Advanced mode which allows digging deeper into related hashtags, or Table mode showing popularity, weekly trends, or correlation.
Twubs
This tool to monitor hashtag performance comes particularly useful in the case of Twitter chats. The tool allows tracking hashtags and joining Twitter chats.
The tool has directories that allow aggregating hashtag relevant to a given topic, for example, business, conferences, events, and so on so forth. You can also register your hashtag and create a hashtag landing page displaying conversations from the Twitter chat.
Awario
Another great hashtag tracking tool can be found in Awario, a web and social media monitoring tool. Awario, similarly to other monitoring tools have plenty of features that analyze online buzz around a hashtag.
With their hashtag tracker and analytics tool, you can help yourself with:
- Finding the right hashtag on the basis of social media popularity and engagement
- Hashtag monitoring on Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, Instagram and Facebook in real time
- Hashtag analytics and metrics analytics in a marketing campaign
- Event management and social media engagement thanks to tracking hashtags in real time
- Sentiment analysis around a hashtag, marketing campaign, brand
- Reporting collected data
- Influencers that resonate well with your audience
- Language and location analytics
Apart from hashtag data and analytics, Awario finds social media profiles that use your hashtags which is a great help in finding influencers or brand ambassadors.
TrackMyHashtag
“Advanced AI-based Self-learning Twitter Tracking Tool”
It’s another great tool one can use to track hashtags, this time only on Twitter is TrackMyHashtag. The tool can track and analyze any profiles, hashtags, or keywords from Twitter.
What’s interesting, the hashtag tracking tool claims to collect both real-time and historical hashtag data. TrackMyHashtag is said to offer historic data starting from 2006. It’s quite rare for hashtag analytics tools to track historical data. Cool!
When it comes to analytics, the tool analyzes hashtag campaigns on various levels:
- Engagement
- Social media reach
- Daily and weekly pattern of tweeting
- Language
- Location
- Most retweeted and liked tweets
- Top URL
- Top image and video
- Top related hashtag
More than that, TrackMyHashtag lets you find top influencers on the basis of engagement, reach and the number of followers they have.
TweetDeck
Another hashtag tracking tool worth mentioning is TweetDeck. It’s not only a trending hashtags tracker, but also an all-in-one Twitter tool, it’s a great Twitter hashtag tracker. Importantly, it’s completely free of any cost and works in real-time.
The tool is basically a huge dashboard with customizable columns that lets you manage Twitter hashtag more effectively. You can set it up to your own preferences and display timeline, mentions, direct messages, lists, popular trends, favorites, search results, top trending hashtags, or all tweets by or to a single user.
Speaking about hashtags, you can track at least a few of them. The tool isn’t that strong when it comes to analytics, but offers effective and real-time hashtag tracking solution.
Talkwalker
Another quite popular tool to track and analyze hashtags is Talkwalker.
It’s a social media monitoring and analytics tool which offers hashtag analytics across more than ten social networks and 150 million websites, blogs and forums.
When it comes to hashtag metrics, Talkwalker tracks the volume of mentions, engagement, reach, and other metrics.
Talkwalker also enables users to perform competitor analysis within social media and hashtag usage. The tool can recognize top themes and new hashtags used by competitors.
Also, the tool identifies top profiles who use the hashtags you track so that you can find potential brand ambassadors or influencers. Another interesting feature worth checking out is comparison of top posts that get the highest engagement. It’s a nice overview of what resonates with your competitors’ audiences.
The tool has a few components:
- Creator
- Generator
- Analytics
- Charts
The most interesting stuff is in Analytics component. All you need to do is enter your hashtag, press one button, and there you have it.
The first chart presents the popularity of your hashtag within its category based on the use. Then, there’s another chart that shows the popularity of your hashtag in comparison to all time most popular hashtags.
Other than that, All Hashtag lets you create your own hashtags and find in no time the most popular hashtags to use in your marketing and social media campaigns.
The benefits of hashtag analytics and tracking
Hashtags are helpful. They let us know what people are talking about among social platforms, help discover trending topics and measure the effectiveness of campaigns. Lots of influencers create their dedicated, unique hashtag to engage the audience.
In-depth hashtag analytics and tracking can boost your social media efforts.
Here are more reasons why is it worth paying attention to its hashtag tracking:
01 It’s an important aspect of event marketing
A dedicated event hashtag allows identifying and engaging people in real-time. This way, you can find participants in a need of assistance, initiate networking, gather feedback, measure the social media reach of your event hashtag and more.
02 It allows measuring your brand awareness through social media reach
If your company uses a dedicated hashtag, you can monitor how it performs in social media: how many people mention your content, where does it appear most frequently, what the social media reach and engagement are and more. Combining all of them will give you an idea of how your company is perceived online.
03 It lets you track and analyze your marketing campaigns
It’s good to create dedicate hashtags that will support your marketing campaigns. Then, you can easily measure its social media impact by looking at the number of mentions, engagement, influential sources mentioning your hashtag.
04 It helps in identifying potential brand advocates and influencers for your business
By looking at the most active and influential authors, you can find your potential brand ambassadors. They can recommend your product to their audience.
05 It analyzes the context of discussions that accompany your hashtag
This one gives you an instant insight into a broader context your hashtag is used in. It displays most frequently appearing words in relation to your hashtag.
06 It shows the sentiment of mentions containing your hashtag
It’s a language filter that shows you positive, negative and neutral mentions.
How to discover trending hashtags?
We all know that using inappropriate and unpopular hashtags won’t give us a broad social media reach.
Using relevant hashtags should be a part of your social media strategy.
How to find a perfect, trending hashtag? One of the ways to do that is to visit social media platforms and manually check trends created by social media users. The second way (much easier) is to use a tool that will analyze the current trends and present the data in a pleasant way.
How to pick a hashtag tracking tool? Conclusion
With the tools presented in this article, you can track hashtags that matter for your business.
Some of them are for free, some are paid. Of course, paid ones have more advanced features that will let you conduct in-depth hashtag analytics. Furthermore, they help discover popular or trending hashtags.
It is a good idea to check the hashtag tracker before payment.
