Whether you’re relying on social media traffic to your blog, or you want to find out which of your own hashtag campaigns is working the best for your brand, then hashtag tracking tools free can give you all the answers.
Have you ever wanted to track the performance of hashtags? To know which hashtags work and which ones don’t? There are a bunch of hashtag tracking tools out there: free and paid. Using the right tool can save you a lot of time and help you get your messages in front of the right audiences on social media. So we did some digging around and we found some great hashtag tracking tools so let’s see them together.
Brand24
Brand24 is a great way to monitor your hashtags in real-time on:
- Twitch
- TikTok
What’s more important, hashtag monitoring is just one feature of Brand24 – the tool allows you not only to monitor but also to analyze hashtag performance and more.
The Analysis tab inside the tool holds plenty of data that presents you with a better context around your hashtags.
Some of the most important metrics you should focus on are:
- The volume of mentions
- Social media reach of a hashtag
- The volume of engagement
- Sentiment analysis around a hashtag
- Other popular hashtags
- Context of discussion
The number of mentions and their social media reach is represented by two charts. All mentions land inside the dashboard, in your inbox, a Slack channel, or inside the mobile app.
Using Brand24, you can monitor the engagement the mentions of your hashtag generate, including comments, likes, and shares.
It’s a great way to track the performance of your marketing campaigns on Twitter and Instagram.
The most active and influential mentions give you an opportunity to identify people who use your hashtag the most. Are there any influential social media users talking about your hashtag or brand? Has an influential website been talking about your hashtag campaign?
To share the insights, you can prepare custom reports. This data will be invaluable for your social media managers. You can improve your social media content and reach your target audience more effectively.
Brand24 is a paid tool, starting $49, however, it has a free 14-day trial period. You can give it a try here
RiteTag
Another awesome hashtag analytics tool that lets you monitor hashtag performance is RiteTag which is a part of RiteKit. It’s a great tool for monitoring what hashtags are currently trending on Twitter and Instagram.
RiteTag provides plenty of data, including Estimated Hourly Statistics, Daily Averages, popular accounts using a hashtag and more. The tool also suggests trending hashtags that increase discoverability and exposure, tells which hashtags get seen over time and which hashtags are becoming less popular. It’s a really in-depth hashtag tracker
The tool has also a browser extension that indicates if hashtags you want to use are trending, have some potential, or not at all.
The free version of RiteTag has a limited range of options. The yearly subscription costs $49.
Keyhole
Keyhole is a social media analytics tool that gives the opportunity to monitor hashtag performance and hashtag analytics on Twitter and Instagram. The tool provides plenty of data, including reach, the number of posts, users, impressions, and more.
Keyhole has also account-level analytics and the Optimization feature that analyzes hashtag performance of a given account. It’s a good way to find out if relevant hashtags work in terms of engagement. What’s more, the tool suggests how to improve your post strategy, optimize post length, and timing.
You can also look for trending hashtags to boost your content engagement.
What’s quite convenient is that in Keyhole the most related hashtags are represented as a tag cloud. It clearly presents the bigger picture.
The tool offers a free trial period. Pricing plans start at $132 monthly, billed annually.
Hashtagify
Similarly to RiteTag, Hashtagify lets you discover the most trending hashtags and other, relevant hashtags. There are not many free hashtag monitoring tools out there, but Hashtagify is certainly one of them.
Here’s what it looks like exactly.
In the basic mode, Hashtagify presents relevant hashtags in a bubble. By hovering over a hashtag, the tool displays data about popularity and correlation from the main hashtag. There’s also the Advanced mode which allows digging deeper into related hashtags, or Table mode showing popularity, weekly trends, or correlation.
The above-mentioned features are free of any cost. However, paid version of Hashtagify offers a lot more with a subscription starting at $9.99.
Socialert
Socialert is an easy to use tool for hashtag tracking that gives you a quick overview of hashtag performance for free. Enter a hashtag, keyword, @mention, accounts which the tool then uses to generate an automatic report so you can start digging into social media platforms like Twitter. More than just hashtag tracking or keyword analytics, you can also use Socialert for event tracking, brand monitoring and tracking competitors.
The filtering capability is a nice option that let’s you know what people are talking about around your brand on various social media channels. You can get a sample Twitter report like the one above for free and for the rest you’ll need to choose one of their paid options.
Key features:
- Twitter hashtag count for every day
- Sentiment
- Country distribution
- Influencer ranking
- Top active users
- Most famous mentions
- Most used keywords
- URLs with Rank
Tagboard
The Pinterest of hashtags. Tagboard is a great way to get a quick, visual snapshot of how a hashtag is being used across multiple platforms. You can also see hashtags that are linked to the one you searched for, which is handy for major events that often have multiple hashtags.
After you’ve searched, you’re welcomed with a board, like Pinterest, with updates from a wide range of networks like Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram, App.net, and Vine. You can also filter out conversations from networks that you’re not interested in. A nice way to focus on the posts that matter.
Tagboard offers a great way to understand and access discussions on a wide range of networks and a powerful system to track what’s most important for you. You can retweet, reply, comment, and like from your tagboard. You can see your top hashtag tagboard for free, but for extra awesome features, there’s a fee.
Key features
- Filter by keyword – if you want to filter the posts having a specific keyword you can use this feature
- Filter by media – you can filter posts on basis of media like video, picture and text
- Advanced filters – under settings you’ll find advanced tab where you can add keyword and URL filters
YouScan.io
YouScan.io is a social media analysis tool. Unlike much of the competition, it includes image analysis.
While YouScan does not make a separate mention of hashtag tracking on its website, it does claim to include all the standard features of social media listening – this will obviously include mentions of selected hashtags.
One way you can find the most important content in your YouScan message streams is to use their auto-categories. Auto-categories help you pick out the most relevant information from a large stream of mentions. YouScan automatically sorts mentions by categories with the help of machine learning. One auto-category is Captions, which picks up hashtags in Instagram captions.
Pricing
Free demo with paid plans starting at $12,000/yr.
BrandMentions
As BrandMention’s name indicates, its primary purpose is to he[p you track all of the online mentions of your brand. It claims to “dig every corner of the internet to find all the relevant mentions about anyone or anything.” It considers some of its major uses as competitor spying, brand monitoring, reputation management, and media monitoring.
Obviously, a product that claims to monitor the internet for relevant mentions of anything will allow you to track specific hashtags. This can be useful for any hashtag, but particularly for your own custom hashtags. You can use BrandMentions to determine whether your custom hashtag has become popular and has had much use.
You can also use BrandMentions to listen to industry trends. It can help you discover some of the best hashtags to use if you wish people to see you as an industry trendsetter.
At the same time, you can spy on your competitors and determine which hashtags they have been following and using regularly.
Pricing
Free 7-day trial with paid plans starting at $99/mo.
Conclusion:
Hashtag monitoring, also known as hashtag tracking, allows you to know which campaigns are performing best and which ones are underperforming. It enables you to keep track of your hashtags so you can optimize them for better results. You can also compare the performance of two different campaigns to measure their progress accurately. However, it is very crucial that you use the most appropriate tools available for this purpose. A wrong choice might lead to inaccurate information or even worse, end up wasting resources.