The beauty of hashtags is that all the data is public. This means that it’s not only your own hashtags you can track. You can learn from your competitors by tracking hashtags used in their campaigns. You can also track broader trending or topical hashtags. Hashtag tracking is a great way to gather intelligence and learn about your audience, your industry and your competitors.
Social Performance Measurement For Agencies
How To Track, Analyse And Make Sense Of Hashtags
Tina Ahmed posted on 8 February 2015
Hashtags are an ingrained part of many social media interactions. People love using hashtags to join conversations, support causes they believe in or simply showcase their creative side. Marketers want a piece of the social proof and virality that trending hashtags can bring and this is why you see hashtags everywhere: on products, in your favourite TV shows, in promotions and in advertising.
What is not clear, even to some marketers who put hashtags in their ads, is how to track, analyse and make sense of a hashtag campaign. It is not enough just to add a hashtag onto your promotion in hopes of “going viral”, you also need to be able to analyse the impact the campaign has had. Tracking and analysing the use of a hashtag helps you see if the campaign is working, what has been achieved and what lessons can be learned to improve future activities. This article will demonstrate how you as a marketer can track, analyse and make sense of hashtags.
10 most interesting pieces of data you can get from tracking hashtags
Let’s take a look at some of the most interesting ways you can use the hashtag data as a social media marketer:
- Monitor, listen and join the conversation. Monitoring usage of a hashtags allows you to connect and engage with people in your target group.
- Get feedback and crowdsource ideas. Analysing sentiment, context and what’s being said about your brand can lead to product improvements and new developments. Your audience will share their uncensored opinion, you just need to be willing to listen and implement some of the feedback you get.
- Identify trends and broaden your reach. Analysing hashtags allows you to see what other hashtags your audience uses and engages with. This way you can get to know more about your audience and what other topics they are interested in. You can identify trends and broaden your reach by entering other niches that people in your audience talk about.
- Identify influencers. Hashtag analysis helps you identify the influencers in the industry that have the biggest audience and reach. You do this by looking at all the people who used the hashtag and ranking them by those who have the biggest following or according to the engagement on the tweet. You can then reach out and build relationships with the influencers who can help you gain a bigger reach in the future.
- Demographical and geographical information about your audience. Who are the people that have used the hashtag? Where are they based? This information could confirm or change the opinion you have on who your audience actually is.
- Hashtag use trending over time. How was the pickup of the hashtag? Any specific days or times where it was used the most? What was the cause of any big spike or big decrease in use? Use this data to help schedule and optimise your next campaign.
- Number of people using the hashtag. How many people participated in the hashtag campaign? A very useful number to showcase internally in the company.
- The reach of the hashtag. What was the reach and the spread of the hashtag? This could be a crucial metric for brand awareness and could demonstrate to the management the value the campaign has brought to the company.
- Calculate the return on investment (ROI). You may be able to determine the ROI by calculating how many new followers or clicks to the website can be attributed to the hashtag campaign.
- Competitor comparison. How does your campaign compare to that of your competitors? You could compare your hashtag campaign to that of a competitor in order to discover what your company lacks or what you are’re doing better.
Tracking hashtags – A step-by-step guide
Doing all of the above would take a very long time if you’re just manually searching on twitter.com. You might even need to hire a data scientist to mine all the big data for you. Luckily Locowise lets you analyse hashtag campaigns quickly and efficiently. You can track your own hashtag campaigns, but you can also track your competitor campaigns as well as any trending hashtags. Hashtag tracking works for both Twitter and Instagram. Here is how
1. Add hashtag
- Click on “Add Profile” in the top right corner
- Click “Hashtag”
- Enter the hashtag (no need to use the # itself) and click “Confirm”
Your hashtag tracking will be visible in the “Overview”. Click on “View” on the hashtag you want to take a look at to access the different analytics charts. Below are five of my favourites.
2. The five interesting charts for quick hashtag tracking
The hashtags features several useful charts that help you analyse and understand the results from the hashtag campaign.
- In “Hashtag Overview” you get all the figures in one neat chart that has the top-line overview of how the hashtag campaign has performed. Number of tweets and retweets including the hashtag, number of people using the hashtag and the total reach of the hashtag. These numbers show the brand engagement and awareness that the campaign has created.
- In “Recent Messages Timeline” you see how frequently the hashtag was used during the time period. Look for spikes or decreases to help you identify what has caused the different trends.
- In “Gender Analysis” you see a simple pie chart which breaks down hashtag usage by gender. See who your audience actually is and how it compares to your expectations.
- In “Top Tweets” you see a simple pie chart which breaks down hashtag usage by gender. See who your audience actually is and how it compares to your expectations.
- In “Other Hashtags Ranking” see a word cloud of relevant hashtags that people use combined with the hashtag you’re tracking. Is there a niche area that you’ve neglected and into which you can make an entrance? All this can help you figure out which and how many hashtags to use in your posts.
3. Share the hashtag report with the team
Locowise allows you to see all the data in beautiful and easy to understand charts. You also have the option to export the charts into PDF, PowerPoint and Excel formats. This means you can easily share and discuss the results with your social media team as well as gain recognition from the management. Just click on the “Report” in top right menu to download the file.
