7 Best Tools for Tracking the Performance of Your Hashtags
Hashtags are an essential part of any social media marketing strategy. They help to unite discussions around one topic, give marketers a deep understanding of what drives reposts and likes among users, and can become a lever for brand promotion.
Hashtags also link multiple marketing campaigns together, and even offline ones (for example, hashtags can be used on TV programs). All this explains why any business needs an individual approach to their creation.
However, it is not always easy for businesses to evaluate the performance of hashtags. There is no real data or information available to answer important questions:
- Which hashtag is best to use in a particular situation?
- Who else uses the same hashtag?
- What audience can be reached with this hashtag?
- Is there a comparison of competing hashtags for the same marketing campaigns?
Let’s stop here in more detail. Consider the best services for tracking and analyzing your hashtags.
Mafluence
Mafluence.com is a simple and convenient service for selecting Instagram hashtags from photos. The main feature of the service is that it works on the basis of the Neural Network and the principles of machine learning.
How it works?
A neural network is actually an attempt to create digital intelligence for certain types of tasks. In this case, the neural network is responsible for the analysis of the photo, and the complex selection of hashtags in the Instagram network, both for the depicted objects and for related topics. Thus, in addition to the hashtags describing the photo, others are added that are suitable for the topic and are currently showing maximum activity in the form of a response from the community (likes, comments, reposts).
At the moment, the service has just launched and is in the active development stage. In the near future, a personal account with detailed statistics, an analyzer of the approximate cost of advertising in an account and an advanced analysis of activity should appear, which in the long run will be able to show what consequences certain actions had on the account.
Pros:
- Simple and fast tool.
- Selection by photo, no need to look for keys or hashtags yourself.
- For free.
- Constant relevance (with each new uploaded photo, the accuracy of the analysis increases).
Minuses:
- At the moment, from the functionality, only the selection of hashtags.
Brand24
Brand24 provides real-time access to all of the above while being suitable for all social networks. You can identify influencers with a high potential level of influence, get a detailed analysis of the mentions used (positive, negative, neutral), check the speed of responses and reactions to user messages.
Advantages:
- reasonable price (prices from $49 to $399);
- quick response support service;
- unique analytics (the ability to ask questions in a quick search, an assessment of the overall coverage, interactive analytics, and more);
- available on iOS and Android apps;
- pay-as-you-go service.
Flaws:
- there are restrictions on the number of keywords;
- there is no separation into photos and videos, as different sources, everything is recorded under 1 channel, which makes the analysis of the results more cumbersome;
- the archive only stores data for a year, which can be inconvenient for brands that manage social media campaigns over a longer period of time.
Mention
Mention is an all-in-one social media monitoring and tracking service that tracks hashtags in real time. You can simultaneously receive a download of information about online search data or a daily summary of information on hashtag mentions for the previous day.
In addition to getting standard data about reach and shares, you can also get internal statistics about influencers, the frequency and volume of hashtag usage, and much more.
Thanks to the ability to set tasks and delegate, Mention allows the entire marketing team to work at the same time. You can also get customized user reports and impact statistics for specific hashtag campaigns.
Advantages:
- finding related stories by your hashtag;
- available in applications on Android, iOS and Windows;
- separating positive and negative mentions through sentiment analysis;
- free version available for 14 days.
Flaws:
- an algorithm for internal prioritization of some mentions, which can cause time and resource costs.
Social Studio
The service, developed on the basis of SalesForce, allows you to comprehensively monitor and analyze social networks.
By creating a hashtag tracking campaign, you get valuable information from all social networks, which means you can determine how the audience interacts with hashtags on different platforms.
You can create fresh themes and trends using Social Studio’s custom control panel. It is possible to study in detail and see the content of the post itself, to read each comment in which your hashtag was mentioned.
With built-in image-based machine learning and a sentiment analysis tool, Social Studio helps you understand the context in which a hashtag was discussed among users. In addition, posts from the target audience can be automatically prioritized so that all members of the feedback team communicate effectively.
Advantages:
- fully integrated cloud product;
- a unified platform for organizing and managing multiple social networks and hashtag campaigns;
- ease in the distribution of tasks among team members;
- review of statistics, reposts, general information, measurement of the depth of audience interaction with posts directly from the service panel.
Flaws:
- in terms of usability, the service is not good enough in comparison with analogues in this niche;
- many functions are hidden, making it difficult to interact with the service.
BrandWatch
With Brandwatch, you can track social media mentions, from general comments on posts to dissatisfaction conversations. In the campaign tracking settings menu, you can easily customize the panel for yourself.
The Brandwatch Dashboard and Query Wizard provide complete information about campaigns, such as hashtags, campaign websites, specific landing pages, and links to special content.
Once set up, the panel shows campaign results for the last 24 hours along with spikes and drops. You can easily use this view to understand the context in which the hashtag was mentioned and identify influencers who can help promote the hashtag.
Advantages:
- simplicity and ease of use of the campaign setup wizard;
- receiving statistics of mentions in real time;
- the view shows the relationship to key topics and the most involved content;
- Brandwatch Audience helps identify potential influencers who are not yet engaged.
Flaws:
- High cost in comparison with similar premium services with similar capabilities.
Talkwalker
Talkwalker monitors hashtags used in various social networks, online news portals, blogs, forums. It covers 150 million sites in many languages, any online and offline channels, including TV and radio podcasts.
Its patented image recognition technology, luxurious analytics, and automatic reports make the service an almost indispensable tool for analysis.
Advantages:
- one panel to view the metrics of hashtag campaigns;
- comparison and comparative analysis;
- ideas about the most effective channels, engagement and the search for opinion leaders.
Flaws:
- insufficiently detailed analysis, as well as reporting capabilities compared to the rest in this six services.
Despite this review, everyone will be able to verify the effectiveness of a particular service only on their own experience, having received and measured real results.
Author: Anna Dudchenko, project manager of the MAVR marketing agency
Internet marketing expert. Head of marketing agency MAVR.
Business degree “Master of Business Administration” (MBA).