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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5 Ways to Combine Twitter Scheduling With Real Time Activities

#1: Find Out When Your Followers Are on Twitter

The best way to reach your followers with your content is to know when your audience is online, and schedule your updates for these times.

A great tool to help you find those hours is Tweriod.

Tweriod looks at your followers’ recent tweets and provides you with analyticsand data that show when your followers are the most active.

All you have to do is adjust the days and times you post on Twitter.

Tweriod results show the optimal times for you to tweet.

To further optimize your tweet delivery, use these statistics to build a sharing pattern that capitalizes on user behaviors:

• Twitter engagement for brands is 17% higher on weekends 
• Users are 181% more likely to be on Twitter during their commute
• Retweets have been shown to be highest around 5 pm 
• The best time to maximize your click-through rate (CTR) from Twitter is 1–3 pm 

Retweets have been shown to be highest around 5 pm.

#2: Share Content Throughout the Day to Maintain Visibility

Whether it’s Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, your followers and fans are based in different places and time zones, and that makes it almost impossible for you to be active in real time whenever they are.

It’s important to keep your social stream fully active with interesting content throughout the entire day to grow your position as a thought leader in your market.

While a good content strategy should include creating original content, it’s well worth your time to supplement your own content with content from others that’s relevant, interesting and new to your audience. More content means more updates, which means more visibility.

During your morning routine, use an online tool to help you find content, then schedule the posts for delivery.

Schedule your updates out over the day rather than publishing too many in a short period of time, and you’ll increase your CTR.

Here are a couple of tips to help as you add other people’s content into your shared updates:

• Start with sharing between 3 and 5 posts per day on each social network 
• Credit the source and the author of the article.
• Add your personal opinion to the post and the subject.
• Use images for greater exposure.

A slower posting pace equals a higher CTR.

#3: Schedule for Holidays and Events

Social media traffic is significantly greater during holidays and other major events and 57% of users turn to Twitter to determine what stores to visit. Now that you know, it’s up to you to catch their attention.

Buzz on Twitter peaked around key shopping dates.

High-traffic seasons are the best time to feed your audience with posts that offer special coupons to existing and new customers, or to show that your brand cares by highlighting its holiday giving.

To make the most of important dates, adjust your social media strategy to include updates or campaigns for each holiday or event that takes place for your customers.

Make sure to keep these tips in mind when you post during special times:

• Use seasonal hashtags like #lastminutedeals or #giftideas.
• Personalize your posts with your own images to drive better engagement.
• Pay to promote your posts and rise above the noise.

#4: Join Discussions in Real Time

Now that you’ve got your scheduled sharing in order, you can take time to join in real-time conversations when people are talking about your brand, your competitor and your market.

Here are three ways to find these conversations.

Mention

Use Mention to permanently follow your brand’s topics and keywords online.

Mention’s alerts panel.

Not only does Mention let you create alerts for relevant expressions you define, but you can blacklist irrelevant expressions to filter for more targeted alerts andfilter in specific languages, which is very useful for localization if you’re a global brand.

Hashtagify

Hashtagify lets you see which hashtags were trending on Twitter for the last week or month:

Hashtagify’s top-trending hashtags.

Because many industries have specialized conversations that are curated with hashtags, it’s a good idea to find hashtag conversations around your own brand or product.

Look for keywords that are related to your brand’s identity and search for a specific hashtag to see its popularity.

Hashtagify displays the popularity of a hashtag.

When you know which hashtags are best for you to follow, join a conversation with your real-time voice.

Tagboard

Tagboard makes it easy to check out and respond to all of the recent and trending tweets around any hashtag. Very helpful if your brand uses a unique hashtag to spark conversations.

Tagboard’s tweet results dashboard.

Use any of these tools to respond to mentions of your brand in a timely and proactive manner.

#5: Take Advantage of Real-Time Opportunity

Anticipating and scheduling posts for holidays and special events should be well-planned. But your team should also be prepared for marketing opportunities from real-time incidents such as sports games or political events.

During the XLVII Super Bowl, the lights in the stadium went out, causing an unexpected stop in the game.

Around 100 million viewers went to social media to express their frustration, where they found this brilliant tweet by Oreo:

Oreo’s Super Bowl tweet put their brand in the best light during a blackout.

Within the first hour, the tweet received 10,000+ retweets, 18,000+ favorites and 5000+ shares and the media went crazy over it.

The result of one well-timed, creative tweet: $0 spent on marketing, 525,000,000 earned impressions.

When uncommon events happen, the media turn to social media to get the answers, drama and creativity, and that’s where all brands have their chance to hit the spot.

Post a relevant, real-time update as soon as something happens and youincrease your chances for massive exposure. That’s effective social media marketing.

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