Hashtag tracking might seem like one of the more challenging tasks in X (formerly Twitter) marketing. If it feels complicated, outdated methods might be to blame. In reality, tracking hashtags has become much easier and more efficient. While manual tracking can consume a lot of time and remains essential to X marketing, spending an entire day on it isn’t practical.
This post offers practical tips to help you track hashtags effectively and save time. Experienced marketers know Twitter provides significant opportunities for growth when using the right strategies. With many new tools and options available, it’s time to explore updated strategies for hashtag tracking.
Let’s explore how you can simplify and streamline your hashtag tracking process.
How Hashtag Research Strengthens Your Business Strategy
Researching hashtags does more than optimize campaigns and content; it can impact your overall social media strategy and broader business objectives. Here are five key reasons why this research is crucial for your business.
Understand Your Audience
Hashtags serve as signals on social media, drawing specific people to your content. By monitoring who engages with your hashtags, you gain insights into whether this audience aligns with your target market. Use this information to build accurate personas and guide content development, helping your brand meet customer needs and extend its reach with the right hashtags.
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Maintain Your Competitive Edge
Hashtag research allows you to monitor competitors effectively. By examining the hashtags they use, you can assess what works and what doesn’t within your industry. This information helps you stay ahead by adapting successful strategies and avoiding common pitfalls, allowing you to learn and grow from their experiences.
Analyze Audience Sentiment
Hashtags reveal valuable information about how audiences feel regarding specific topics, brands, or industries. By tracking hashtags, you can gather real-time insights into public sentiment around your brand, your competitors, and industry trends. This research enables you to tailor your content to resonate with your audience and respond to issues as they arise.
Stay Relevant to Trends
Keeping an eye on trending or emerging hashtags related to your industry helps you adapt your content and campaigns to align with what’s currently popular. Adjusting your strategy based on relevant trends increases visibility and keeps your brand present in the minds of your audience, ensuring ongoing relevance.
Identify Influencers and Brand Advocates
Hashtag research can help you find influential users and brand advocates who align with your audience and values. Discovering these advocates, who regularly post content relevant to your products or services, offers collaboration opportunities that can increase visibility, boost credibility, and expand your reach. Collaborating with these loyal supporters strengthens brand loyalty and increases engagement across platforms.
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The Importance of Hashtag Analytics for Effective Social Media Marketing
Hashtag analytics are essential for gaining insights that inform better decisions and strengthen your social listening strategy. By using hashtag analytics, you can refine your approach, ensuring that your content reaches the right audience and performs well across social media platforms.
Hashtag analytics help identify the most effective tags for your marketing campaigns and monitor how well your posts perform. Here’s how they support a successful strategy:
- Discover Relevant Hashtags: Analytics enable you to identify the hashtags your audience engages with, allowing you to participate in conversations that matter on platforms like Instagram, X, LinkedIn, TikTok, and others;
- Understand Audience Interests: By analyzing which topics and posts resonate with your customers, you can create content that aligns with their interests, building stronger connections and increasing engagement;
- Monitor Hashtag Performance in Real-Time: Real-time tracking of hashtag performance reveals emerging opportunities, giving you the chance to adjust content quickly and stay current with trends;
- Identify Influential Channels and Accounts: Hashtag analytics help you find the most active and influential channels or accounts mentioning a hashtag, so you can engage with key contributors, expand your reach, and build valuable partnerships across platforms.
Using hashtag analytics enhances your overall strategy, enabling you to reach target audiences more effectively and respond to shifting interests and trends in real-time.
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Selecting the Right Hashtag Tracking Tool
When choosing a monitoring tool, consider these key factors:
- Platform Support: Ensure the tool covers the social networks you use most, like Instagram or X, even if it’s a free option;
- Data Capabilities: Look for tools that offer:
- Real-time tracking for current trends;
- Historical data to assess past performance;
- Notifications for instant hashtag mentions;
- Engagement metrics and hashtag analytics;
- Reporting options for comprehensive insights.
Free tools are useful for a trial run but often have limitations, such as tracking fewer hashtags, providing less detailed analytics, or capping daily searches. However, they can still offer valuable insights and some may even include advanced features.
Key Metrics for Evaluating Hashtag Performance
Tracking hashtags is essential to gauge their effectiveness in your social media strategy. Here are some important metrics to consider:
- Popularity: Frequently used hashtags are often searched more, and including popular ones can boost visibility. However, avoid irrelevant trending tags just for exposure. High engagement with a popular hashtag can also indicate campaign success among target audiences;
- Reach: This metric shows how many people view your content. Low reach may suggest that the selected hashtags aren’t the best fit for your strategy or campaign;
- Engagement and Interactions: Beyond visibility, engagement measures how users interact with your hashtagged content. High interaction rates, like shares, extend your campaign’s reach and reflect impact;
- User Demographics: Check that the users interacting with your hashtags align with your target audience. Seeing engagement from the right users indicates that your messaging is reaching the intended groups;
- Sentiment: Monitoring the sentiment around a hashtag provides insights into audience attitudes. Positive sentiment can strengthen brand perception, while negative sentiment helps identify areas for improvement, allowing timely adjustments to campaigns.
Top 10 Tools for Tracking Hashtags
Here are some effective tools for hashtag tracking. Some are free, while others require a monthly subscription depending on the features you select.
Twilert
Twilert is a powerful, all-in-one Twitter search and hashtag tracking tool, designed to meet the needs of businesses and brands aiming to maintain a strong presence on X. By monitoring Twitter continuously, Twilert captures relevant tweets in real time, ensuring that no important interactions or mentions are missed. Equipped with advanced search features, Twilert enables businesses to filter tweets precisely and customize alerts, making it ideal for tracking specific campaigns, managing brand reputation, and discovering engagement opportunities on X.
Key Features:
- 24/7 Real-Time Monitoring: Constant tracking of Twitter to capture relevant tweets instantly;
- Advanced Search Options: Supports Boolean operators for precise filtering, allowing users to exclude keywords, filter by location, or specify languages;
- Search History & Email Digests: Stores important tweets for easy access and delivers email summaries to keep users updated;
- Scheduled Alerts: Set up alerts on a schedule or receive them in real-time for breaking news and potential engagement opportunities;
- Geo-Targeting: Location-based tracking for targeting specific regions or areas;
- White-Label Agency Solution: Customizable options available in the agency package for branding and client-specific needs;
- Multi-User Tracking: Monitor multiple Twitter accounts or users simultaneously for comprehensive brand and customer insight collection.
Talkwalker
Talkwalker’s Free Social Search tool offers comprehensive hashtag analysis across social media, news platforms, forums, and podcasts, covering 186 languages. It provides insights into metrics such as buzz, engagement, sentiment, and reach over the last seven days. Users can also access trending themes associated with each hashtag to aid in content strategy and view a list of top influencers for potential collaborations. The tool includes features like side-by-side comparisons, various filters, and Boolean operators for more precise search results.
Key Features:
- Multi-platform search spanning social media, news, forums, and podcasts;
- Sentiment analysis for gauging public opinion;
- Demographic data showing age, gender, and interests of users;
- Geographic distribution on a global map;
- Comparison tool for up to four search terms;
- Boolean operators for precise searches.
StarNgage
StarNgage provides a free Instagram analytics tool with basic features, assisting marketers in improving influencer campaigns by delivering data on hashtag performance and user profiles. It highlights leading influencers using specific tags and recommends additional options to broaden reach, accompanied by performance metrics.
Key Features:
- Real-time Instagram hashtag analytics, including post and video data;
- Influencer identification based on hashtag use;
- Related hashtag suggestions;
- Reports on leading brands and posts using the hashtag.
Hashtag Tracker by BrandMentions
BrandMentions offers a complimentary hashtag tracking tool with detailed analytics across social media and the web, enabling real-time performance monitoring. Users can input a hashtag to access a report detailing its reach and influence, including leading influencers by sharing of voice and associated posts.
Key Features:
- Real-time monitoring across multiple platforms;
- Detailed metrics, such as mentions, reach, interactions, and sentiment analysis;
- Visualization of trending topics and word clouds;
- Breakdown of mentions by media type (Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, etc.);
- Top influencers and websites using the hashtag.
Inflact Hashtag Generator
Inflact offers a free generator dedicated to creating relevant Instagram hashtags to enhance your content’s visibility. By inputting a keyword, photo, or URL, users receive a list of tags categorized by frequency and ranking difficulty. Each hashtag is accompanied by additional insights, such as how challenging it is to rank for and the number of daily posts (available for some tags).
Key Features:
- Hashtag generation by keyword, photo, or post URL;
- Categorization by frequency (Frequent, Average, Rare);
- Difficulty rating (Easy, Medium, Hard);
- Suggestions for organic hashtags relevant to Instagram;
- Related hashtags based on similar keywords.
RiteTag
RiteTag offers a free hashtag suggestion tool, providing immediate recommendations for both images and text on various social media platforms. By analyzing real-time hashtag engagement, it delivers insights to help users choose hashtags suited for Instagram, general visibility, or ongoing exposure. RiteTag also includes performance analytics to guide campaign planning.
Key Features:
- Hashtag suggestions for text and images;
- Real-time engagement insights;
- Performance analytics, including unique tweets, exposure, and retweets;
- Multi-platform compatibility;
- Browser extension for easy access.
Taggbox
Taggbox specializes in gathering and utilizing user-generated content (UGC) from hashtag campaigns across social platforms. It includes a 14-day free trial without requiring payment details. Taggbox automatically gathers UGC from hashtag campaigns, enabling collection, moderation, and publication across marketing channels. It also offers rights management to secure permissions from creators and includes analytics for performance tracking.
Key Features:
- Automatic content aggregation from hashtag campaigns;
- Tools for moderating UGC;
- Rights management for secure content use;
- Performance analytics with sentiment analysis;
- Customization options for displaying UGC.
TweetBinder
TweetBinder provides a free analytics tool for X, offering quick insights on hashtag performance. The free version analyzes up to 200 tweets from the past seven days, tracking metrics on hashtags, accounts, or keywords. Reports include engagement, reach, contributor rankings, and sentiment scores, revealing key influencers in related conversations.
Key Features:
- Analyzes up to 200 recent posts on Twitter;
- Sentiment score tracking;
- Contributor rankings and stats;
- Economic value estimation;
- Engagement metrics and reach.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social’s hashtag tracking tools simplify analytics, helping to expand reach and grow audiences. Its Tag Report tracks hashtag growth across networks, while the Listening tool provides detailed insights into conversations around specific hashtags and keywords, analyzing sentiment and engagement. On Instagram, it identifies top hashtags by engagement and monitors key ones in social feeds, helping brands stay active in relevant conversations.
Key Features:
- Cross-network hashtag tracking with Tag Report;
- Listening tool for in-depth analysis of hashtags and keywords;
- Top hashtag tracking by engagement on Instagram;
- Follows key hashtags in social feeds.
All Hashtag
All Hashtag supports brands in generating, analyzing, and tracking hashtag performance across platforms. It suggests relevant tags based on entered keywords, evaluates their popularity and reach, and monitors trends. Additionally, it includes a counter to manage the number of hashtags in posts or captions.
Key Features:
- Hashtag generation based on keywords;
- Popularity and reach analysis;
- Trending hashtag monitoring;
- Hashtag counter for posts.
Key Hashtag Types to Track for Social Media Success
There are various types of hashtags you can incorporate into your social media content, and tracking each type offers unique insights. Here’s why it’s beneficial to monitor each one:
Location Hashtags
Location-specific hashtags can help expand your reach to targeted areas or regions. These tags are especially useful for brands with specific regional audiences or for scaling content internationally. For instance, a New York-based coffee shop might use #NYCCoffeeLovers to connect with its local audience or a travel company could use #ExploreScotland to attract travelers interested in Scotland.
Event Hashtags
Event hashtags are valuable for connecting with audiences around specific occasions. Use these tags when attending or hosting events, such as conferences, festivals, or sporting events. Event hashtags can be used to live post updates, generating excitement and engagement with your content while increasing reach around your brand’s activities.
Branded Hashtags
Branded hashtags typically feature a business name, product, or campaign, aiming to encourage users to tag your brand. Examples like Coca-Cola’s #ShareACoke help boost brand recognition. Monitoring these hashtags, especially for campaigns, offers valuable insights into how many people are discussing your brand.
Campaign/Ad Hashtags
For campaign-specific hashtags, examples from X include Nike’s #JustDoIt, which focuses on inspiring users during specific launches or initiatives, and Apple’s #ShotOniPhone, which invites users to share photos taken with an iPhone. Tracking the reach and response of these tags can reveal audience engagement and campaign effectiveness.
Trending Hashtags
On X, popular trending hashtags often revolve around events or themes, like #WorldCup during major sports tournaments or #MetGala during fashion events. Utilizing trends like these when they align with your content can significantly boost visibility. Regularly checking analytics helps determine how such trending tags perform and their contribution to your reach.
Product and Service Hashtags
Product- and service-specific hashtags promote particular offerings and allow for tracking related social discussions. They can be generic, like #makeup, or branded, such as #DuoChromeEyeShadow. Monitoring these tags helps you gain insights into customer opinions, emerging trends, and potential areas for addressing customer concerns.
Final Thoughts
Tracking hashtags on Twitter is essential for expanding reach, increasing engagement, and understanding audience preferences. By identifying the right types to track and choosing effective monitoring tools, brands can build a data-driven social media strategy. These practices help ensure they connect with the intended audience, stay relevant to current trends, and strengthen X marketing efforts.
