5 Hashtag Tracking Tools for Twitter, Facebook and Beyond

Why Use a Hashtag?

Hashtags make it easier for people to find and follow discussions about brands, events and promotions. They also let brands track the performance of promotions across social media.

Hashtags can determine how easily you can target and track a campaign. You’ve probably seen many businesses use generic hashtags like #food or #chocolate. While these will get your update into a large conversation, using such broad hashtags is wasting your time.

Can you imagine how many posts (tweets or otherwise) contain #chocolate every minute? Managing the hashtag would be a nightmare. You’d spend weeks sorting through every instance of the hashtag to determine which mentions apply to you.

It’s worth the effort (and your sanity) to come up with a unique hashtag that fits with your particular campaign.

A good example is Subway’s #januANY campaign. Their hashtag has two key components: it’s distinctive enough to track easily and it’s simple for fans to remember.

Subway uses hashtags that are memorable and easy to track.

As you’re choosing a hashtag, follow Subway’s lead. A good hashtag is memorable, unique and relevant to your campaign.

Following those guidelines, you’ll find it’s much easier to keep track of how many people are participating in your campaign and spreading the word.

Read on to discover five tools that can effectively track, analyze and report how others are using your hashtag.

#1: RebelMouse: Embed Your Campaign on Your Website

RebelMouse is your best friend if you’re running a cross-platform campaign.

Not only does it fetch hashtag conversations happening anywhere on social media, it also offers integrated Google Analytics, social sharing, RSS feeds and content moderation.

Add to that a custom domain feature with customizable designs and CSS capabilities that let you embed RebelMouse on your website, and you have a one-stop shop for your social storytelling.

RebelMouse is your social media front page.

Burger King’s #SATISFRIED campaign used RebelMouse to pull hashtagged Instagram photos into their website and show off how fans were being satisfried.

RebelMouse embedded on the Burger King website.

Having people share the hashtag provided social proof for friends of friends and helped Burger King reach a wider audience.

#2: Tagboard: Get the Complete Conversation

Tagboard gathers text, video and image posts to give you an overall picture of what’s being said around a hashtag.

After grabbing relevant conversations from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+ and Vine, Tagboard puts them in a user-friendly interface where you can interact with the results.

Tagboard lets you track hashtags across multiple platforms.

Audi used Tagboard to track their Super Bowl ad for #Bravery in 2013. They were able to pull in tweets, Facebook mentions and Instagram mentions.

Audi has been using hashtags with their Super Bowl ads since 2011.

#3: Talkwalker: Analyze Hashtag Campaigns

Talkwalker is more than a hashtag tracking tool. Its capabilities go far beyond letting you listen to and engage with conversations around hashtags.

Talkwalker gives you data for gender distribution, geographic distribution and sentiment analysis on your own hashtags, as well as your competitors’ hashtags.

Track more than mentions—get key demographics with Talkwalker.

All the data are easily filtered, sorted, analyzed and charted using their tool. The insights can be seamlessly exported into Excel, PowerPoint and Word so you canmanage and present results easily.

#4: Bundle Post: Generate Hashtags Automatically

Bundle Post is a very useful content management system that lets you generate, organize, schedule and post content for hashtag campaigns. It also integrates with HootSuite, HubSpot, Buffer and other systems.

Bundle Post automatically generates hashtags for you.

This tool has a specialized feature that identifies popular keywords in your content and automatically replaces those words with hashtags. After you type these keywords and phrases into the Bundle Feed feature, it goes out and finds relevant, related content for you!

#5: RiteTag: Find the Perfect Hashtag

RiteTag optimizes updates for Facebook, Twitter and Google+ with the best possible hashtags for your post, then analyzes them to let you create a library of hashtags to use.

To make publishing easier, RiteTag has an extension you can add to your web browser. Use the extension to schedule updates with your optimized hashtags from wherever you are.

Bonus Tools Just for Twitter

Tweet Binder and Twubs are specialized Twitter tools for analytics and filtering conversations, respectively.

Tweet Binder lets you enter a hashtag, then provides an in-depth report of actual conversations, retweets, associated images and links based on your hashtag. Once you get the results, you can categorize your findings by influencers, contributors or other media filters.

Tweet Binder gives you a custom ranking feature for events.

Twubs acts as a live stream for Twitter chats. It has been known to be more real-time than Twitter itself! If a hashtag conversation is moving too quickly for you, just hit the Pause button to catch up.

Use Twubs to track your hashtags in real time.

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Your Business's Heaping Helping of Hashtag Strategies for Facebook

Has your business begun adding Facebook hashtags to its social marketing strategy?  In a previous Facebook for business post, we introduced you to hashtags for Facebook business pages.  Now, we are going to provide you with ways to leverage Facebook hashtags and make them an effective part of your brand’s social media marketing plans.

Plan Accordingly

Because this tool is new, Facebook hashtags are not catching on with brands and consumers as quickly as other new Facebook features.  In our mind, one of the biggest reasons for this is that they are being used randomly with no rhyme or reason.  That is why our first tip is simply that your business must map out an actual plan for how it will put hashtags to use in its social media strategy, test that plan and make changes when necessary.

Back to School

Besides a lack of a plan, another reason Facebook hashtags are slow to catch on is that many of the social network’s users do not understand them.  They do not know that they can search for a hashtag in the Facebook search bar or that hashtags are clickable.  Once a hashtag strategy is implemented – for now – businesses should educate their fans on the Facebook hashtag basics and on the hashtag campaign’s purpose.

All Tied Up

Because hashtags are now a big part of multiple social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram), businesses should amplify marketing efforts with cross-channel campaign promotions.  This does not mean your brand should create one piece of content and blast it across all social networks.  Instead, you should create one hashtag tied into a promotional campaign, use it in your posts and follow the posting etiquette of each social channel.

Ride the Wave

Is there a newsworthy event, trending topic or hyped-up fad that is capturing the attention of social network users on both a local or world-wide scope?  When this happens, there is no doubt that there is also going to be a related hashtag floating around the social channels.  If you can find a way to work that hashtag into your Facebook posts in a natural way, then do not hesitate to do just that.

Wider Not Tighter

To reach beyond your customer base and bring new prospects on board as new Facebook fans, you should look at using broad topic hashtags.  Seasonal hashtags are a good example of this strategy.  A post such as, “Warm up your #winter with a spiced-up coffee from #CupAJoe” will reach a wide audience scanning the winter hashtag content and also showcase your business with your specific, brand-related  hashtag.

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4 Ways Marketers Can Use Facebook Hashtags

Why Facebook Hashtags?

As you’ve undoubtedly seen, hashtags are now clickable and useable on Facebook.

Using a hashtag # (or pound symbol) in front of a word or phrase turns the word into a clickable link.

When you click on the link, you’ll see a feed of public posts (or posts that are visible to you due to a friend relationship on Facebook) that include that hashtag.

Here’s how you can use Facebook hashtags:

#1: Expand Your Reach

As hashtags gain momentum on Facebook (they’ve been in use on other platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and Google+), they’ll help you expand your reach to people who are looking at posts in your topic.

Hashtags have been a great way to help people interested in niche topics find each other and find the conversation.

The #WalkingDead hashtag connects people interested in this show.

By including a hashtag in your post, you can possibly get in front of people who may not have seen your post otherwise.  But you’ll have to monitor this in your Facebook Insights.  Make sure you watch your Reach and Engagement Numbersto see if your hashtags are making a difference in your posts.

Click the Reach column in your Facebook insights to see which posts are getting the highest reach.

#2: Amplify Your Brand

Branding your Facebook Page with your own special hashtag can help an idea or new product catch on.  By branding all your posts about a new product, you can break this information out into a separate stream of information and give people an easy way to share information about that product or idea.

Think carefully about what types of things others would also be interested in sharing.  If the posts are too promotional and not valuable, you may have a hard time getting people to share them with their friends.

Home Depot uses #HDHacks to share fun ideas with their audience.

#3: Cross Social Platforms

If you’ve already been using hashtags in your Twitter, Google+, Instagram, LinkedIn or Pinterest posts, it’s now more natural to use hashtags in Facebook.  You can save some time by being able to post the same content across several platforms.

While I don’t recommend doing this for every post in Facebook (some people are annoyed by the hashtags entering into the Facebook realm) it does work to your benefit to occasionally cross platforms with a single post.  Plus many people have already been doing this with their own posts from Twitter and now the hashtags are more searchable in Facebook.

The Starbucks #treatreceipt hashtag has been in use on Twitter in the past and is now searchable on Facebook too.

#4: Promote Specials and Events

You can use a special hashtag in your posts to promote something special.  For example, this can work really well for a #contest.

Use a specially branded hashtag to help promote a contest across several platforms.

Realize that you can’t have people enter your contest on Facebook by including your branded hashtag like you can on Pinterest, Instagram or Twitter.  Because of Facebook contest promotional rules, you can help people find the content across platforms by including the hashtag in your Facebook posts.

If you know some popular hashtags that fit your marketing goals—such as offering a special coupon or deal—then you can include them in your post as well.  I don’t recommend stuffing your posts with tons of hashtags that aren’t relevant because that doesn’t look good and may turn off some of your fans, but a few relevant hashtags are OK.

You can also attach a hashtag at the end of your post that's relevant to people looking for special deals such as #backtoschooldeals.

Important Considerations When Using Facebook Hashtags

1.  Privacy settings are still in effect.

If you’re using hashtags on posts on your personal profile, they’ll still have the privacy settings set up according to how you control your privacy on your profile.  Just because you use a hashtag doesn’t make that post suddenly public.  If you add a hashtag to a post that you only share with a certain group of your friends, only that group will be able to see that post.

Your privacy settings are still in effect even when you add a hashtag to your post.

2.  Hashtags have to be all one word.

If you wanted to use #Facebook Marketing as your hashtag, it will need to be posted as #FacebookMarketing or #facebookmarketing (see the next tip).

3.  Capitalization doesn’t matter.

You can choose whatever capitalization you want in the words themselvesand the hashtags will show the same results.  #FacebookMarketing and #facebookmarketing show the same search results.

4.  You can make up whatever hashtags you want.

There’s no “hashtag registration” or “database of approved hashtags”, you can make up whatever hashtags you want to use.  Consider your goals.  If you want to brand your own hashtags, you can, but make them short and easy to use and understand.

A hashtag that’s overly complex or hard to read won’t get much traction.  If you’re abbreviating, make sure it’s clear what point you’re going for – a hashtag like #IKPMTTTRWD won’t mean much to many people.

5.  Research your hashtag before you use it.

There have been some recent embarrassing cases of brands using a hashtag that’s already in use for an entirely different purpose that doesn’t align with their company message at all.  Take a look at the social sites where hashtags are in use such as Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram and Google+ and see if your hashtag is already being used by people.

6.  You can easily look for hashtags on Facebook by URL.

Easily search for hashtags or bookmark their results by using the URL:  www.facebook.com/hashtag/ then just include your keyword on the end.

For example https://www.facebook.com/hashtag/FacebookMarketing shows you the results of posts that include #facebookmarketing or #FacebookMarketing (or any alternate capitalizations).

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