Do you know the difference between a novice and a seasoned social media marketer?
The former uses hashtags randomly, while the latter takes their time and relies on hashtag analytics to boost their social performance! (PS: be the 2nd one!)
If we jump to 2007, hashtags were used to categorize content on Twitter. Today, they are widely used across all social platforms to fuel new trends, boost discoverability, and drive audience engagement.
But that’s only possible when you regularly perform hashtag analysis, monitor their performance, and use them strategically.
In this blog, we’ll discuss in detail hashtag analytics, its importance, metrics to track, and top hashtag tools to try! Let’s get started.
Hashtag Analysis is all about constantly evaluating data and metrics to understand the performance of a search phrase or tag you’ve used in your posts. It can help you understand the popularity, reach, and effectiveness of a particular hashtag and strategize better for future uses.
In simple words, hashtag analysis can help you find the right set of hashtags you can use in your social media posts for better reach.
Any random group of alphabets with a # sign can be a hashtag. So, how do you know if this is the right hashtag for your social media strategy?
The first step is to check if the hashtag falls into one of the categories you need to target.
Here are 4 different types of hashtag categories you should be tracking:
These hashtags are specifically meant to segregate content for your brand, product, or feature.
Many brands have trending hashtags curated specifically for their social media channels like:
Branded hashtags can help you keep track of the number of users talking about your brand online. In a way, such tags are direct indicators of brand awareness.
In this category, you get hashtags that are seeing sudden search and usage growth due to recent social media trends.
Some examples of evergreen trending hashtags are:
Read more: 100+ Trending Hashtags for Instagram Reels in 2024
With trending hashtags, you can tap into recent conversations going on in the social media world and aim to reach a wider audience.
Hashtags specific to an industry or niche are known as industry hashtags. For example: if you are active in the gardening community, the right hashtags for your account will be something like:
For hashtags related to more industries, check out: Trending Hashtags for Social Media (Industry-wise).
Industry hashtags are ideal for establishing yourself as an active contributor in the industry and connecting with other like-minded individuals.
Event hashtags are related to a particular large-scale event like a sports final, webinar, product launch, etc.
Some well-known and viral event hashtags include:
With event hashtags, one can easily find what other people attending the same event are saying. It can also be used to gather more audiences and spread awareness.
Hashtags can help you grow in an organic and targeted manner — we’ve already established that!
But you can’t simply go about and enter random hashtags you feel like in the post caption. That’s likely to confuse the algorithm and isn’t ideal for helping you reach the targeted consumer niche.
That’s where hashtag analysis comes into the picture.
Now, let’s understand why hashtag analytics is important for your business on social media.
If you have recently launched a campaign with a branded hashtag, you need hashtag analytics to know how successful the hashtag was in bringing in an audience. Doing so will also help you analyze the popularity of hashtags amongst your target audience.
With hashtag analysis, you can find top-ranking posts and see what’s trending and best liked by your target audience. Based on that, you can also seek new content ideas and accelerate your content marketing game.
With hashtag analytics, you will also be able to see who is more interested in content tagged with hashtags from your niche. Based on that, you can also know their other interests and find a way to reach them effectively.
Hashtag analytics can help you grow, no doubt! But in what context and on what measures should you measure the hashtag performance?
To answer this question, here are key hashtag metrics you should be aware of:
How many times a particular hashtag has been searched? Hashtag popularity will give you an idea about that!
But also remember that more searched hashtags are also more used, which in turn can act as a double-edge sword.
As such, you only need to find the right set of hashtags with low and medium popularity.
With frequency, you can find out how often is a particular hashtag used by brands operating in your industry.
Now, the tricky part is that you need to experiment and find hashtags
Hashtag reach tells you how many people are able to see the content tagged with that particular search term or phrase.
Naturally, one should aim for hashtags that have a higher reach and can help get your content more visibility.
Like accounts, hashtags (or topics) can also have followers on Instagram!
Search for hashtags that have plenty of followers. It might indicate that the consumer group is eager to see topic-related content even without following the user profile.
Simply seeing the hashtag-ed post isn’t enough. The audience also needs to engage or interact with the post to generate the desired results and meet the campaign objectives.
Find hashtags that show more people commenting, liking, or sharing the posts, as compared to ones with limited to zero interaction.
Tracking hashtag performance or conducting hashtag analytics can indeed be a tricky task.
One way is to manually invest time in clicking through all the tags and noticing engagement patterns associated with them. Here, you can also visit the accounts that have successfully used and gained sufficient interactions with those hashtags.
The procedure might seem lengthy, but it is quite effective for seeking hashtag inspiration and working with a goal-oriented approach in mind.
However, there’s one drawback — if you are a full-time marketer or a social media manager, you can’t repeat this procedure for every client. That’s where automation jumps into the picture (no surprises there!).
You can use a social media platform’s native analytics section to deep dive into hashtag performance.
However, it’s not necessary that you will get detailed data about advanced hashtag analytics or trend comparisons between two hashtags.
There are several third-party tools that can help you with hashtag analytics and bring relevant insights into picture.
Let’s have a brief look at a few of the top hashtag tracking tools you can use for social media growth.
Vaizle’s trend analysis feature is a hashtag-tracking goldmine! Not only can you analyze hashtag trends for your brand, but also compare them with those of competitors.
You can use Vaizle to effectively discover competitors’ brand activity, along with product, communication, and social media strategy.
Keyhole’s hashtag and keyword tracking tool is another good option to measure the impact of your social media campaigns.
You can use Keyhole to get campaign data for different social platforms, find impactful influencers within your niche, or instantly spot any recent industry trends.
If your efforts are specifically geared toward Instagram, Later is an ideal hashtag analytics tool for you! Here, you can easily track the hashtag used on each post and find which one generated the maximum engagement.
However, there’s a drawback! Later can’t help you track hashtag analytics for social media platforms other than Instagram.
Sprout Social’s hashtag performance tracking tool is an ideal option for tracking hashtags most associated with your brand or tracking growth patterns for specific keywords.
You can use Sprout Social to find the most-used hashtags to stay active in recent online conversations.
Fedica is a hashtag reporting tool that allows you to create reports and show who is using a particular hashtag and other relevant data related to audience demographics.
You can use Fedica to identify your most influential advocates, find top posts in the campaign, and even discover new hashtags and keywords.
Social media SEO is on the rise, which in turn is letting marketers think that hashtag analytics is no longer beneficial. However, that’s not entirely correct.
Hashtags are still useful for boosting your brand discoverability, categorizing content, and getting more eyes on your profile!
But that’s only possible when you’re taking hashtag analytics seriously. Hopefully, this blog convinced you to get started with hashtag analysis.
With Vaizle, you can not only see trend analysis but also access the exclusive ads suite to understand audience demographics and conversion analysis.
Oh, and I forgot to mention — 7-day trial only starts at $1.
To find trending hashtags on Facebook or Instagram, you can use the search bar at the top. Based on what you’re about to write, you will automatically be recommended with the top hashtags.
You can repeat the same procedure for Vaizle’s trend analysis. Simply click on the search bar and you’ll be able to see the top hashtags used by you or your competitor.
Like Facebook and Instagram, the YouTube search bar will also show you the latest hashtag suggestions when you start typing # in the search box.
DAPC stands for Daily Average Post Count and tells you the number of posts made using a hashtag daily. Do note that DAPC data is based on the average value of the last 7 days of activity.
To check hashtag analytics for Instagram, you need to have a professional account. Go to the ‘Insights’ section under any post and scroll down to find the hashtags section.
Mamta is an SEO Analyst with 2 years of experience. Currently, she is spending her time on content roadmapping to drive organic growth and engagement for SaaS businesses. Mamta is also an avid cinephile who spends her spare time watching latest action and sci-fi flicks from around the world.
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