My Favorite Hashtag Tracking Tools 2018

08 Mar My Favorite Hashtag Tracking Tools 2018

Analyzing and measuring your campaign’s success (or lack thereof) is essential in your social media marketing development and strengthening your social media strategy or campaigns. One way to analyze the success of a campaign, or to measure the growth of your reach is to get into the habit of creating a hashtag for the campaign, and tracking that hashtag.

Paid hashtag tracking tools can be expensive but will make the process a lot less laborious. For the rest of us, resourceful hashtag tracking requires organization, consistency, and a few  free tools. Here are a few of my favorites for you to try.

BEFORE YOU START…

Test and pick your tracking tool

Make sure you test each hashtag tracking tool before choosing one for your campaign or branded hashtag. Play around with various tools until you find one you feel comfortable with and that fits your needs. Pay attention to the sample sizes or time frames as they change from tool to tool.

Choose the hashtag(s) you’ll be tracking

Will you be tracking a general hashtag for your brand or a hashtag for a specific campaign? Both? Jot down which hashtags you need to stay on top of. Don’t forget to run an initial audit to see where the hashtag stands before you start. If you need to brush up on you hashtag basics check out:

• How to Find the RIGHT Hashtags for Your Business
• 8 Top Hashtag Mistakes and How To Avoid Them
• How To Get The Most Out Of Your Hashtags

Determine how long you’ll be tracking your hashtag(s) for

As I mentioned above organization and consistency are your best friends when it comes to free hashtag tracking. Make sure you have ample lead time as to when you will begin using and tracking your chosen hashtag or hashtags. Most tools will only track 7 days worth of data at a time.

If you’re continuously tracking a brand hashtag, make sure you have reminders set you know when to come back to check in and record results.

Set up your tracking document

Set up a hashtag tracking document where you can gather your hashtag data. The tool you choose may determine what you keep track of. This can be the number of posts the hashtag is used in, impressions for the hashtag for a specific set of time, photos posted using the hashtag etc. Choose the metrics that matters to you and that you have access to.

Set reminders

Most free trackers only give you information going back a specific amount of days or number of posts. Set a reminder so you never miss the deadlines to gather your info.

TRACKING YOUR HASHTAGS

Now that you’ve got yourself all set up, it’s time to start gathering information. Here are some of my favorite hashtag tracking tools:

Twitter Search

Twitter’s own native search can be a good starting point to track a hashtag. Quantifying your finds will have to be done manually – know anyone that loves counting tweets?

Keyhole.co

Keyhole doesn’t require you to sign into their service to get hashtag stats (and is the only service on this list that won’t ask you to). You’ll receive a report containing sample data from your search criteria with beautiful charts which break down share of posts, related hashtag and keywords, plus more. The service also tracks Instagram posts.

Tweetreach

This tool is one of my all time favorites – I’ve been using it for years. Unfortunately free analytics or “snapshots” as they are called within this system will only capture activity for the last 100 tweets that use your hashtag. The information is presented beautifully and you’ll be able to see your top contributors. The report can be downloaded as a pdf.

Tweet Binder

Tweet Binder provides beautiful visuals and breaks down tweets by type, including text tweets, replies, retweets or tweets with images. Like the rest of the free tools, this one will only give you analytics for up to 2,000 tweets from the last 7 days. There are Instagram reports available, but for a fee.

AgoraPulse

Okay, so AgoraPulse isn’t free, but it’s great for keeping tabs on hashtags and keeping track of interacting with people using a specific hashtag. The service won’t show you impressions, but you’ll know how may posts have used the specified hashtag in messaging.

Brand24

Brand24 is a leader in the social media listening and monitoring space and they offer two great hashtag tracking tools. The first I want to tell you about it their weekly list of trending hashtags which is a great place to go for inspiration when creating content for your brand or business. You can take a look at what hashtags are popular in 9 niches and get in on the conversation – an amazing way to stay relevant.

The second is their Hashtag Search tool which offers campaign management to find influencers using the hashtag, counts the number of posts which use the hashtag (and reach – which we are always looking for!). One added bonus is that you can export the data as well.

Brand 24 Weekly Hashtag Tracking Tool

Brand24 Hashtag Search Tool

Hashtag tracking with limited resources will be tedious, but not impossible. For brands with a high volume of tweets, the best bet is to go for a paid analytics/tracking platform. As for tracking hashtags on other networks, like Instagram you can use the built in search, or a service like Twubbs or Storify – which will pull content that uses the hashtags, but again quantifying will have to be done manually – so get used to counting!

What are some of your favorite hashtag tracking tools? (paid or free)

<3

DhariLo