Various platforms can give you valuable knowledge on how your hashtags perform on social | Source: Shutterstock

Must-have hashtag tracking tools for your marketing strategy

WHEN used correctly, hashtags become an integral part of any social media marketing strategy. They label your content, allowing it to become more easily discovered by an audience. Thus, leveraging the power of hashtags generates great exposure for your brand, and increases the amount of engagement on social platforms.

Despite the great power of a hashtag, it is not always easy for businesses to track their performance and effectiveness.

Many businesses wish to understand things such as which hashtags are best to use for a campaign, what companies are also utilizing the same hashtag, what kind of audience is likely to be attracted by the hashtag, and how does a hashtag perform compared to different hashtags used in the similar campaigns of competitors.

Getting answers to these questions is, in fact, possible. A blog post by Hongkiat has outlined some of the best-rated tracking and analytics tools which are specifically suited to manage your brand’s hashtag campaigns.

Brand24

This platform gives users real-time access to every single mention of your hashtag across various social media platforms. From it, you are able to identify high potential influencers, view sentiment analyzes to gain an understanding of either negative, positive, or neutral mentions, and respond to customer messages instantly.

Source: Shutterstock

Brand24 is easy and affordable, users see quick results, and can even help you pitch direct sales messages to people searching for your brand with particular keywords or purchase intent.

Potential downfalls to this platform relates to keyword quota limits, and the problem that the system archives only a year’s data, which could be a potential concern for brands whose campaigns spread over a longer duration.

Mention

Mention is an end-to-end social media monitoring and tracking suite which enables users to track hashtags in real time. Users can either conduct online searches or receive daily alerts containing information of hashtag mentions.

As well as providing basic information regarding hashtags such as reach and share, it is also possible to get insights on influencer identification, the frequency and volume of a hashtag, as well as various other aspects.

A potential drawback of Mention is that its ‘Priority Inbox’ algorithm often flags some important mentions that could lead to wasted time and resources.

Social Studio

This platform is a social media monitoring and analytics suite designed particularly for hashtag tracking.

It allows you to get insights across all social media accounts in order to gain an understanding of how hashtags are performing in relation to audience engagement.

With Social Studio’s machine learning-powered image and sentiment analysis tool, the context surrounding how your audience is discussing your hashtag can be discovered.

On top of this, the platform enables work to be easily organized and distributed among team members. For instance, audience posts can be automatically prioritized and given to team members for follow up actions.

A possible drawback of this platform is that there are various hidden functionalities which make it a tad complicated for the user.

Talkwalker

Talkwalker enables the tracking of hashtags across social media platforms, online news portals, blogs, and forums. It covers an impressive 150 million websites, dozens of languages, and both offline and online channels such as TV and radio broadcasts.

Over 1.8 billion photos are shared every day on social media, many of which contain images featuring brand logos. Yet, up to 80 percent of these photos do not explicitly mention the brand within the text, which makes it difficult to get a view of your online brand presence.

What makes Talkwalker particularly impressive is its proprietary image recognition technology that allows over 30,000 brands to identify their logos in images posted on social channels and online. Now, brands have the power to discover their brand presence more widely.