Julia Miashkova — April 5, 2020 Every time we’re tempted to think of hashtags as the newest thing of the past, we’re proven wrong. In times of uncertainty, hashtags serve as a means of community building and information sharing. In a debate, hashtags are labels used to proclaim alliances and define adversaries. As part of a skillfully crafted marketing campaign, hashtags get scattered all over social media, amplifying reach and winning audiences.
Hashtags work, and they do so quite remarkably (think #MeToo). However earthshaking, though, hashtags come and go. The trick is to catch them in between: craft or spot the ones gaining momentum and know where and for how long to use them. To do so, you need reliable toolkits built to scrape all of social media and bring you the most relevant hashtags to power your messaging.
In this post, I review some of the best tools for hashtag tracking used by marketers and PR teams of all shapes and sizes. Whether you’re looking for a toolkit to accommodate an entire marketing/PR department or just yourself, there’s certainly a perfect fit for your needs somewhere on the list.
1. Awario
If you haven’t used social listening in your marketing work yet, do give it a try. Awario is a social listening tool — this means that it monitors social media (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit), blogs, news, and the web in real-time to find and analyze all mentions of any keywords, hashtags very much included.
There are several ways to use Awario for hashtag tracking. You can put in a hashtag and the tool will collect every single mention of it, while also running analytics on the usage and reach. You can refer to the Topic cloud and discover similar hashtags used alongside your seed hashtag. Alternatively, you can set up mentions monitoring for your brand, competitors, or industry to explore hashtags trending in your niche. Those can be used to add momentum to your ongoing activities.
Pricing: the Starter plan is $ 29/mo, Pro is $ 89/mo, and Enterprise is $ 299/mo. An annual plan saves you 2 months.
Free trial: 7 days for the Starter plan.
2. Keyhole
Keyhole is a hashtag tracking tool that focuses on hashtag analytics for Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Keyhole offers both real-time performance tracking and historical data for when you need a report on your previous marketing campaign.
The tool also boasts an ROI calculation option for your Instagram hashtags. This is brilliant for brands employing influencer marketing on Instagram, as through hashtags you get to see exactly how much impact the influencers are making. Keyhole’s Influencer Hashtag Analytics is definitely something to try for every company relying on influencers’ performance and reach in their social media strategy.
Pricing: Professionals is $ 199/mo, Corporations is $ 599/mo, and Agencies & Enterprise is $ 999+/mo. Yearly plans save you up to 50%.
Free trial: 7 days for Professionals and Corporations.
3. Talkwalker
Talkwalker is a premium social media monitoring and analytics tool that boasts its own Hashtag Tracking IQ App. With it, you get to track hashtags across 10+ social networks. Talkwalker gives you a 360° overview of hashtag performance in a single dashboard: total mentions, reach, engagement, sentiment, and much more.
Discover hashtags used by your competitors and trending online right now, explore the sources to know which platforms are the most effective for your messaging, and, as a bonus, identify influencers driving the conversations. Talkwalker gives you the tools to make the most out of using hashtags across all media channels.
Pricing: the Basic plan is $ 9,600/year, Corporate and Enterprise are available upon request.
Free trial: no, but there’s a free demo available.
4. Taggbox
Taggbox is a social media aggregation and curation tool. Based on your seed hashtag, it brings you endless user-generated content, with the option to run live hashtag campaigns on digital screens or websites. Meanwhile, Taggbox Analytics supplies you with insights on hashtag performance. As part of monitoring a hashtag, you can track impressions and total posts.
Similar to other hashtag tracking tools, Taggbox helps you discover industry influencers and the users who are most active in posting trending hashtags in real-time. You can also make a distinction between various types of posts (text, image, or video), as well as locations and social platforms.
Pricing: a range of plans varying from $ 19/mo (Website) to $ 500/mo (E-commerce). The Enterprise plan is available upon request.
Free trial: 14 days.
5. Hashtracking
Hashtracking, as the name suggests, is a tool built around hashtags exclusively. Use Hashtracking Explorer to scrape social media for recent and historical data, discover popular hashtags and buzz words, run engagement analysis, and dig into performance metrics across social networks and locations.
Hashtracking is a great solution for optimizing your influencer marketing workflow, as it brings you key publishers, content, and topics. Meanwhile, the tool’s most impressive bonus is ColorTracking analysis. The feature works for Instagram and enables you to sort posts by color and compare performance of different color palettes for enhanced engagement of your own visuals.
Pricing: a variety of plans ranging from $ 60/mo (Basic) to $ 1,800/mo (Platinum).
Free trial: 14 days for the Basic plan.
6. RiteTag
RiteTag, a part of the RiteKit family, is essentially a hashtag navigator for Twitter and Instagram. Its job is to give you hashtag suggestions, generate new hashtags for Instagram (as well as guide you away from currently banned options), and make sure you know your platform hashtags to the bone. RiteTag also lets you create hashtag sets and benchmark different hashtags’ performance against each other.
As far as Twitter hashtags are concerned, the RiteTag offers analytics tools for data going 30 days back. These are insights into tweets, retweets, likes, replies, exposure, and other valuable data on top of that. RiteTag delivers sentiment assessment, usage stats, and even emoji analysis — all to make sure you have your hashtag workflow nailed to perfection.
Pricing: starting at $ 49/year (covers hashtag suggestions for 1000 queries/month); hashtag reports are charged separately.
Free trial: 7 days.
7. TweetDeck
TweetDeck is a tried and tested dashboard for Twitter that brings all your profiles together, allowing for smooth monitoring and management. It’s a great option for anybody working with Twitter exclusively with little to no budget. Still, the tool can bring solid results to those who put effort into it.
Use the app to filter content, location, users, engagements, and alerts. This way, you’ll be able to monitor hashtags, keywords, geotagged tweets, and tweets with the biggest reach. TweetDeck is also a perfectly usable content curation tool, with features that let you track topics and trends, all the while using top-performing tweets for your own accounts that you can manage right in-app.
Pricing: free.
Recap
Hashtags are as versatile as they are effective. Used by private individuals and huge brands alike, hashtags serve as a powerful tool for growing reach and engagement. The best part is that with the tools available today, mastering hashtags has never been easier. Make sure you give hashtag tracking tools a try. You’re welcome to use my suggestions and see how they elevate your social media marketing work.
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