Hashtags are a necessary component in the digital marketing space.
Why?
Because they help you categorize posts, increase your engagement, attract followers, and strengthen the exposure your brand gets by helping you reach out to your target audience.
According to recent Instagram statistics, there is a clear advantage to using hashtags. Posts that have at least one hashtag have higher engagement levels than those that have none.
After analyzing 1.2 million tweets, Dan Zarella, Hubspot’s social media scientist, found that tweets with one or more hashtags are 55% more likely to be retweeted than those without them.
The right hashtag tools can help you drive success in social media strategy by providing you with a platform to choose, create and track hashtags for your content.
Here are some of the top hashtag tools to get started with.
1. Hootsuite
Hootsuite helps you to manage your social media in a single place. The dashboard layout lets you see the latest updates from specific users or hashtags in one quick glance.
As well as scheduling social media posts through Hootsuite to hit followers when they’re most active, you can create “Streams” that bring up relevant hashtags for your business.
If, for example, you’re running a one-off campaign with an accompanying hashtag, you can create a Stream especially to track the conversations around that hashtag.
From the Stream, you can quickly respond to messages and follow accounts to increase engagement levels around your business.
The reports feature lets you monitor how well each hashtag is doing, and let’s you see all social media updates from that hashtag in one place, regardless of the platform they’ve been shared on.
It’s not just your own hashtags or popular industry-related hashtags you can follow either.
You can also get an inside look at what conversations are happening around your competitors’ hashtags to see what topics are trending and what content is driving their audience to engage.
This will give you more ideas for content you can quickly create to compete and drive more engagement.
Hong Kong Airline uses Hootsuite to carry out industry research, analyze sentiment, deliver campaigns, and manage incident communications, leading to a 212% increase in brand sentiment.
2. TINT
TINT provides the tools you need to discover, collect, curate, and display user generated content across all your marketing campaigns, websites, apps & displays to increase trust.
It works by allowing you to bring together the content shared under an identified hashtag so you can request rights from users and deploy in your marketing activities.
This will save you a ton of time.
Instead of logging into every social platform, digging out relevant user generated posts by searching for your brand hashtag, and then collecting each individual piece of content, you can simply do it all from one location.
From there, you have access to a slew of pre-made content and media that you can share in other parts of your business to generate engagement.
You might incorporate User Generated Content (UGC) from a certain hashtag into a launch email (which boosts open rates and performance), integrate it into paid ads to increase click through rates and impressions, or add it to product pages to improve conversion rates.
Take Boise State University as an example.
They were able to increase their hashtag usage by 300% with the help of TINT.
In fact, TINT analytics helped Boise State university to see a 300m impression surge on its #BoiseState hashtag during a highly-awaited football match with Washington state.
On top of that, it helped the communications team to plan ahead and ensure the future success of digital marketing campaigns by providing insights on people’s interests.
3. Hashtagify
Hashtagify is another great tool to help you boost your success in your hashtag marketing efforts. It does this by finding the top relevant hashtags for your brand and trending topics on Twitter and Instagram, which helps you build relationships with your audience and determine what key topics they’re talking about so you can jump in and get involved.
One key feature provides you with the best ten hashtags related to your brand or event. You can then incorporate these hashtags into your social media updates to gain exposure for your brand and to generate higher levels of engagement among potential customers.
Hashtagify’s hashtag lab is updated daily to keep you well informed with current trends, and allows your social media team to monitor each relevant hashtag to choose the best ones for your brand.
You can tap into insights about different hashtags on Twitter and Instagram and analyze their success through advanced tracking.
On top of that, you can download reports on your chosen hashtags’ performance, pulling in the relevant data into easy-to-read charts and graphs which you can then audit and take inspiration from to improve future campaigns.
The Instagram tracking feature also allows you to access important information on the amount of likes and engagements a particular hashtag has.
This reveals the hashtag’s potential to increase engagement and conversions for your content, while providing rich insights into how you can join in the conversation and better connect with your audience.
4. KeyHole
Keyhole is a real-time automated hashtag tracking tool.
You can use it to track URLs, usernames, keywords, and, most importantly, hashtags on Twitter and Instagram.
You can also embrace Keyhole’s social listening and social media analytics to get important insights around different topics of interest. This means you never miss an important conversation, as every discussion around your chosen hashtag is delivered straight to your inbox.
This makes it really easy to discover and connect with relevant and engaging influencers in your industry, and allows you to instantly access information about how your audience reacts and engages with your brand.
You can also see what your audience posts under your hashtag, – whether it’s positive or negative to your brand image – and who shares it.
Keyhole automatically tracks all of this so you can see who your top followers are and access comments that might require a sensitive or timely response.
Finally, Keyhole suggests relevant keywords and hashtags for your brand, giving you the chance to promote your brand in circles you might not have considered before. This helps you to better plan future social media campaigns, incorporating the most engaging hashtags and reaching the most amount of relevant consumers.
Arizona State University uses all the benefits of Keyhole to help its PBS journalists and students to become authorities in trending topics by helping them tap into what’s hot and creating or joining in discussions there.
5. Twitter Advanced Search
Twitter has a free advanced search option on its platform that allows you to search for various hashtags in your area of interest.
You can access it by going to the main search page where you’ll find the advanced search option under the search filters (or you can visit twitter.com/search-advanced).
The advanced search option has sections that allow you to pre-determine the kind of results you need. This helps you find different hashtags and conversations you might be looking for and means you can jump in right away and get involved in conversations that are already happening.
Want to know the best part?
Twitter advanced search gives you the power to select or choose exactly what you’re looking for and, as a result, shows you the exact hashtag matches and their performance levels over a certain period of time.
This saves you a ton of time that you might otherwise have spent searching and going through millions of website pages on the internet looking for the best hashtags for your content.
You can get really specific with your searches too. For example, you can choose to see only the positive or negative posts or only posts shared within a certain time frame.
6. RiteTag
RiteTag is a part of the RiteKit suite and allows you to easily manage and monitor hashtag performance.
See which hashtags are currently trending and jump on the bandwagon to get your social updates seen, or use those trends to generate future content ideas that you know your audience is interested in.
RiteTag’s key features include estimated hourly statistics, daily averages, and the chance to see which popular accounts are using a hashtag so you can get in on the action.
There is plenty of data to dig in to, as well as a discoverability feature that tells you which hashtags increase in views over time and which ones are becoming less popular.
7. Tweetreach
The free version of Tweetreach gives you a peek into the activity of the last 100 Tweets to use your chosen hashtag.
You can track which hashtags have been used the most in your niche in the past few days through the designated “snapshots” (which are basically visual analytics).
Data is king in Tweetreach, which presents its findings in a beautifully visual format that easily lets you see who the top contributors are in each hashtag. They can also be downloaded as a PDF to take to meetings and divvy out amongst stakeholders.
IKEA used Tweetreach to track a really fun campaign they ran in one of their Florida stores. Workers were split into teams and given a kind of scavenger hunt to participate in, Tweeting their achievements as they went. The goal was to generate the most impressions in 90 minutes.
The brand used Tweetreach to track the Tweets, which generated more than 8million impressions in an hour and a half and reached more than 700,000 unique Twitter accounts.
8. Trendsmap
If you’re running a local business, Trendsmap is the perfect tool for seeing what hashtags are making waves in your area.
The tool works by showing the latest trends in your chosen location so you can see what your potential customers are talking about online. You can then create email or Slack-based alerts on any topic to be the first in-the-know about what’s trending in your area.
On top of that, you can see the most influential users in your area, which can be beneficial for collaborations and local marketing, as well as phrases that are particularly prominent where you are. You can then sprinkle these throughout your content or use them to spark inspiration for future content ideas.
9. Ingramer
Struggling to come up with hashtags?
It can be tricky finding out what hashtags are popular in your niche, but Ingramer has you covered. The “bot” helps you generate a slew of hashtag ideas based on a specific set of keywords that are relevant to your brand, an image, or a link that points to an existing post.
The tool uses AI to scan the image and keywords to generate a list of relevant hashtags. Note that it prides itself on finding high quantities of keywords, which sometimes means the quality isn’t up to scratch.
It’s a good starting point for finding ideas you might not have thought about before, but be sure to scan the suggested hashtags before simply copy-pasting them into your posts.
One London-based nail bar managed to grow their Instagram account by 25,000 followers in just four months by tapping into Ingamer’s hashtag suggestions and reaching a much wider audience.
10. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is an all-rounder in the social media world, allowing you to search popular blog posts, influencers, and trending topics in your niche.
However, it’s also great for discovering what’s “buzzing” on social media.
Through the backend system, you can search for specific hashtags to see how they performed across a range of different social channels, plus you can also see a list of posts where the hashtags most frequently appear.
You can create content alerts for keywords in your niche so you know who’s publishing what as soon as it goes live. This will give you content inspiration, as well as a chance to get ahead of the game in being one of the first brands in your niche to post on trending topics.
Win At Content Marketing
There’s no doubt that hashtags are a popular tool for increasing your brand’s exposure on social media, reaching new followers, and generating engagement in relevant circles.
But finding, tracking, and implementing hashtags that will do all of these things isn’t an easy task. Sure, you could spend hours scrolling through post after post of the top hashtags in your industry or scour every social media platform to find the most populated hashtags, but that’s likely to take up a whole load of time.
Alternatively, you can use one of these tools that work hard to help you discover which hashtags are the most popular in your industry, track their performance, and provide you with a deeper insight into how your audience is behaving on social media.
Hashtag research is necessary in today’s social media-driven landscape, but it doesn’t have to be arduous and time-consuming. Instead, use what’s available to you to make the most out of this powerful social feature.
Ready to create a winning hashtag strategy? Request a demo with our team who can share more marketing strategies with you.
