How many of you are use hashtag tracking tools to help you identify and plan out your social media campaigns?
Recently, I was giving a presentation on how to leverage hashtags and spent a lot of time answering questions from people wanting to know if there were social media tools to help identify which hashtags they needed to include.
In this article, I am going to cover five hashtag tracking tools you can use to find the right hashtags to use with your social media campaigns.
What are hashtags?
For those of you new to hashtags, hashtags are a way to group conversations together.
For example, I conveniently use the hashtag #AskCK to make it easier for users on Twitter to ask me questions.
This also makes it easier for me to track the conversation by simply clicking on the hashtag.
Hashtags are also very useful when you want to insert your information into other larger conversations.
An example of this is using the hashtag #BizTips when sharing updates that are business related or using #Socialmedia when sharing content that is social media related.
Benefits of using hashtags
As I mentioned, by including hashtags in your discussions, it makes it easier for people to follow the discussion that is taking place.
For example, many events create their own hashtag so that attendees can see who is saying what at an event.
If they did not include hashtags, it would be difficult to follow all of the conversations taking place.
The same holds true when trying to measure how effective your social media campaigns were.
Imagine having to go through thousands of conversations. By including a hashtag, you can quickly filter the conversations to only show conversations using a specific hashtag.
This way you can quickly see the conversations and measure your performance.
5 Hashtag tracking tools
Now that you are aware of what hashtags are, how do you identify which hashtags you should be using in your social media campaigns?
Fortunately, there are a number of hashtag tracking tools you can use to help identify, analyze, and measure the effectiveness of a social media campaign.
1. Hashtracking
Hashtracking is a hashtag tracking tool exclusively for Twitter.
This tool provides a number of features.
- Identify how popular a hashtag is based on tweets and retweets
- View statistics on how frequent a hashtag is used
- Identify influencers using the hashtag
- Identify top Twitter users
2. Tagboard
Tagboard is one of my favorite hashtag tracking tools.
This is because you can monitor the hashtag usage across the following social networks:
- Google+
- Vine
This is very convenient because not only can you see how popular a hashtag is across different networks from one tool, you can easily monitor mentions about your brand.
3. RiteTag
A third tool used for tracking hashtags is RiteTag.
With RiteTag, instead of identifying individual hashtags, you can input suggested topics or hashtags and they can analyze and grade your tweets.
This way you can improve them so that you get the maximum reach possible.
Other features of RiteTag include:
- Grade tweets
- Create tag sets to re-use with similar tweets
- Schedule tweets
- Grade tweets via a browser extension
4. Tweet Binder
With Tweet Binder, you can quickly analyze and filter conversations and create binders based on specific terms you select.
Tweet Binder also provides terrific analytics to not only help you identify which hashtags to use, but also when to use them.
This hashtag tracking tool is used by a number of major brands such as the NFL.
5. Twitter search
One of the best free hashtag tracking tools is Twitter search.
With Twitter search, you can identify hashtags you may want to consider using in your next social media campaign.
While the tool isn’t as robust as the other hashtag tracking tools mentioned, you can leverage Twitter analytics to see how your tweets are performing.
Final thoughts
While hashtags were initially used by Twitter, it is great to see hashtag usage expanding to Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
When starting a new social media campaign, how much research do you do beforehand to see if you are using the right hashtags?
Leave a comment and tell me how much time you spend doing research and which hashtag tracking tools you use.