In the world of Twitter marketing, hashtag analytics is what greases the wheels of your branding campaign. Brands tweeting with hashtags get 50% more engagement and 55% more retweets. With thorough analytics, you can determine the performance of your posts and make changes to boost outreach and engagement.
It is estimated that there are over 396.5 million Twitter users. And every single day at least 500 million tweets are sent with about 125 million hashtags.
Twitter is a hashtag-driven platform, influencing everything from news to business to social awareness. Spreading the word is easy with hashtags, and if you’re not using them, you should be.
Selecting and analyzing hashtags is key to making your Twitter marketing efforts effective. Here’s everything you need to know about Twitter hashtags and the best tools for hashtag analytics.

Are Hashtag Analytics and Twitter Analytics the Same?

No, hashtag analytics and Twitter analytics aren’t the same. In Twitter analytics, you can analyze how your audience interacts with your posts and profiles – including clicks, follows, likes, retweets, and a lot more – and refine your strategy based on that data. It is the best way to gauge your business performance on the platform.
Hashtag analytics analyze the performance of hashtags specifically. They are used to determine whether your hashtags are yielding positive results. It will tell you which hashtags are ranking in the “top posts” feed, for how long your content has been ranked, and what percentage of hashtags you’re using. Plus, you’ll learn which hashtags work consistently and which ones don’t.

What Twitter Analytics Does (and Doesn’t) Tell You

A Twitter Analytics report gives you an overview of how your brand is performing in the eyes of consumers. Among its features are highlighting the top tweets that are attracting the most attention, tweet count on Twitter, followers, and brand mentions. Besides this, it shows your brand’s evolution over time.
What it does well:
Analyze organic and promoted ad impressions and engagements
Easily measure monthly performance, including impressions, engagement rate, links clicked, retweets, likes, and replies.
Real-time engagement metrics include retweets, likes, and replies.
Where it falls short:
The historical data is very limited and cannot be compared.
It doesn’t have features for deeper analysis, like audience data. There’s only limited information about followers and the community (like top users, influencers, etc.).
Because it’s an account overview, all the stats are for Twitter profiles. We can’t filter for hashtags or posts.

What Twitter Hashtag Analytics Tell You

Twitter Hashtag Analytics work wonders for boosting impressions. Identifying influencers, finding useful links, analyzing trends, and more are easy with hashtag analytics. With Twitter hashtag analytics, users can find out about trending topics, reactions to occurrences, how they share, and what they explore. You can also determine what hashtags your followers use and how well your brand hashtags perform. These insights can be gained from hashtag analytics, including:
Number of mentions
Reach on social media
Score of presence
Engagement

Do Hashtags Impact Engagement?

A hashtag is what gives your brand a little buzz, amplifying engagement and reach. When you include hashtags in your tweets, you’ll receive double the engagement and clickthroughs compared to if you didn’t.
When planning a Twitter content strategy, hashtag analysis is crucial for identifying trending hashtags and ongoing conversations so you can post engaging content and increase engagement. Your tweets will be more visible if you use hashtags in them.

Which Hashtags Should You Track?

It is easy to get lost in the sea of hashtags in the digital age. For a successful campaign, some hashtags stand out in the crowd. To begin tracking hashtags, determine which ones should be tracked. Each hashtag serves a different purpose, so you should consider every type of hashtag carefully.

Track Topic Hashtags

Topic hashtags highlight the topic of a tweet and help people find relevant content. For example, if you’re tweeting about digital marketing, use #DigitalMarketing.
Your tweet will be categorized into the digital marketing category, increasing its visibility and your SEO authority. You can also find news and resources by following topic-related hashtags. Keep track of these so you know which hashtags are popular when sharing industry-relevant content.

Track Trending Hashtags

A hashtag becomes trending on Twitter when it is used frequently within a short timeframe. By tracking trending hashtags, brands can contribute to current events or topics as well as increase their visibility by reaching more users with the same interests. Trending hashtags can help your brand get more viral attention when they are used effectively.

Track Hashtags for Your Brand

Brand hashtags are created and promoted by companies to identify their brands. A brand like SocialDog uses the hashtag #SocialDog to advertise its products on Twitter. Typically, a branded hashtag consists of your company name or your company name plus a keyword.
Keeping track of this hashtag allows you to see how many people are discussing your brand and stimulate user engagement. Often, SocialDog includes its branded hashtags in its tweets, which generates higher engagement rates.

Track Hashtags for Your Events and Campaigns

Always create personalized hashtags when launching an advertising campaign or holding an event. This helps your business generate media attention around specific activities.
However, the hashtags must be unique every time. Do not use the same hashtags all the time. In this way, your products and services will create excitement on the platform. Lastly, you can track these hashtags easily and determine how these metrics benefit your business.

How to Choose the Best Hashtags Analytics Tool

When choosing a hashtag tracking tool, ensure that you have access to all the relevant information before making a decision:
Consider the number of hashtags tracked, whether they suggest hashtags to increase reach, top trending hashtags, and top influencers.
Choose one of the hashtag analytics tools that gather data in real time.
Make sure it provides analytics and reporting so you can figure out what metrics are relevant.
Be sure to choose hashtag tools that notify you as soon as someone uses your hashtag, so you can react quickly.

4 Ways to Track Hashtags for Free

Even for experienced digital marketing pros, finding the right hashtags can be a challenge. Using a hashtag tracking tool is one of the most effective ways to analyze hashtags. Check out these 4 ways to track hashtag analytics for free to accelerate the process.

Track Hashtags Manually on Twitter

Manually tracking a hashtag is not the best idea, but it’ll work. With Twitter’s search feature, you can find trends or hashtags of your choice. Click the #Explore tab on your Twitter account. Next, click on Trending, and you’ll see a list of the most popular hashtags in your area.
Checking out the trending hashtags lets you see how many tweets are using a particular hashtag, and whether you should join in. However, if you’re looking for deeper insights into engagement rates, top-performing hashtags, or analytics, you won’t find them here.

Create a Hashtag Stream in Tweetdeck

If you only want to find and engage with hashtags, but don’t need advanced features or statistics, Tweetdeck is the way to go. In Tweetdeck, a simple stream will be enough if you are monitoring topic hashtags. It’s completely free to use for hashtag campaigns.
In the search bar, type what you want to find to create a hashtag stream. This can then be added to the Tweetdeck dashboard as a column. In this way, Tweetdeck goes beyond real-time monitoring to offer you long-term streaming each time you log in.

Social Searcher

This tool is a great option if you want to track your Twitter hashtag analytics for free. Social Searcher is a real-time search engine for social media platforms that monitors trends, mentions, and topics in real-time.
The tool will curate all the tweets using a hashtag that you search for, filtering by platform, and you can see all the latest tweets with that hashtag. It lets users search for hashtags on Twitter without logging in and saves searches for email alerts.

Socialert

You can use Socialert not only for generic and typical hashtag tracking but also for data analysis. You will be able to count hashtag mentions, track hashtag usage, and discover popular hashtags, links, and top tweets.
You can even track your competitors’ hashtags and keywords, giving you an advantage. Socialert provides you with useful reports that will help you to plan your marketing strategies more effectively. Socialert tool is free, but there’s also a paid version available.

The 5 Best Hashtag Tracking Tools

While the native Twitter app is useful for keeping abreast of trends, brands lack the time to comb through it regularly. Check out these best hashtag tracking tools that analyze and track Twitter hashtags to get an in-depth look at hashtag analytics for your Twitter campaigns.

SocialDog

Although SocialDog is primarily geared toward Twitter monitoring, it can also act as a powerful hashtag tracking tool. It provides you with a detailed overview of each hashtag’s performance, including its popularity and trend score daily, weekly, and monthly. SocialDog also analyzes both historical and new data.
Furthermore, the tool shows you a wall of posts with or without the hashtag, along with its usage patterns. Your hashtag’s performance will be projected in a report that can be exported as CSV. You can measure many metrics, such as hashtag impressions, engagements, and retweets.
SocialDog’s hashtag analytics data can help users research, plan marketing strategies, predict future events, and improve hashtag usage. With SocialDog, you can choose from 4 plans, including a free trial of 7 days.
Lite: Unlimited free
Lite+: $9/month
Pro: $49/month
Business: $99/month

Hashtagify

Hashtagify will help you understand how your brand hashtags are being used- including which influencers are using them. With this hashtag tool, you can analyze Twitter hashtags in-depth, track their popularity over time, and find out which countries are using the hashtag the most. If you use your hashtag, you can find usage patterns from the last 60 days. Among its 3 plans, Hashtagify offers a free 7-day trial:
Personal: $29/month
Business: $86/month
Enterprise: $311/month

TrackMyHashtag

TrackMyHashtag is an AI-powered hashtag analytics tool that tracks, monitors, and analyzes any hashtag’s performance. Depending on your industry or content topic, you can also access the most popular hashtags. In addition, it allows you to track tweets that mention your hashtags in real-time. You can use this tool to find key influencers and monitor the marketing strategies and hashtags of your competitors. There are 3 pricing plans, so pick one that works for you.
Basic: $49/month
Professional: $99/month
Corporate: $249/month

Talkwalker

Talkerwalker hashtag analysis feature syncs with social media analysis – a great way to track individual metrics across multiple social media accounts. This hashtag tracking and analytics tool provides data in real-time about total shares, reach, engagement rate, and total mentions related to your hashtag.
Based on the hashtags you track, the tool recommends brand ambassadors and influencers. Talkwalker’s unique “sentiment analysis” feature determines if your audience likes or dislikes your brand. You can get a free demo, then paid plans starting at $9,000/year.

Tweetbinder

Tweetbinder analyzes hashtags and finds conversations related to them, making it an amazing tool. You can group hashtags based on your set criteria to make them easier to find. Tweetbinder lets you enter a hashtag and provides a report that summarizes actual conversations, retweets, associated images, and links related to that hashtag. Using the results, you can categorize your findings by influencers, contributors, or other media.
Currently, Tweetbinder offers 3 plans:
Starter: $83.25/month
Advanced: $257.12/month
Enterprise: $1285.66/month

Conclusion: Boost Your Business with Twitter Hashtag Analytics

Now that you know the basics of hashtag analytics and the tools to analyze and track hashtags, it’s time to get to work. By tracking the right hashtags, you can expand your brand’s reach. On average, a tweet with one or two hashtags receives 21% more engagement than one with three or more.
Nowadays, brands are heavily focused on hashtags, and Twitter Hashtag Analytics tools make it easy to track your competitors’ hashtag usage and how your hashtags perform. With the help of SocialDog’s Twitter tool, you can create an effective hashtag marketing strategy that can help you scale your brand.

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