Social media has undergone a remarkable transformation. What once was a realm for sharing birthday party photos and breakfast updates has now emerged as a powerful business tool, capable of boosting sales and broadening your audience.
💡 Read Media Monitoring: The Ultimate Guide
In this reality, hashtags have become essential tools that help businesses connect with their ideal audience and bring in new customers.
In this blog post, we’ll share with you the best ways to find relevant hashtags for your niche with the power of hashtag research tools (free and paid). Stay tuned!
Why Do You Need A Hashtag Research Tool In Your Social Media Strategy?
Social networks employ hashtags to categorize and organize user generated content under specific topics, brands, or trends. This simplifies the process for users seeking posts related to a particular subject. In turn, brands can attract their target audience by using relevant hashtags.
According to MarketPath, on Twitter, tweets with hashtags receive twice as much engagement. Moreover, tweets that include hashtags are 55% more likely to be retweeted, which means it’s crucial for your brand to maintain a curated list of brand specific hashtags as a fundamental element of your social media strategy.
Long gone are the days when you were puzzled over the most effective, semantically related hashtags by searching them on social media manually. Hashtag research tools have taken over this part of your work, streamlining hashtag selection and improving its quality.
These user-friendly tools provide you with a list of relevant hashtag ideas, keywords your audience frequently uses, and best performing hashtags in real-time.
You can also discover new hashtags to expand your audience and create content that resonates better with their preferences. Among other things, hashtag research tools often offer data analysis capabilities, allowing you to build profiles of individuals who engage with your hashtags.
Without further ado, let’s explore 7 free and paid hashtag tracking tools (“treasure boxes” for PR and social media managers).
Read Which is the Best Hashtag Tracker in 2024? Our Top Picks
Determ
Determ is an AI-powered online media monitoring solution that enables you to identify keywords, measure real-time data in any language from around the world, and create reports for in-depth analysis of your marketing campaigns. When it comes to hashtags, they offer the following features:
- Monitoring. Easily track hashtag mentions and user activity by using powerful search filters and keyword setups.
- Influencer research. Identify influencers by hashtags for effective collaboration.
- Reporting. Receive structured and customized hashtag reports to assess the true value of your efforts.
- Alerts. Never miss an important mention by configuring alerts to the ones you need.
- Data analytics. Utilize reach and engagement hashtag metrics to make data-driven decisions and create a robust content marketing strategy.
“The fact that it monitors keywords across different channels and that it’s super easy to set up filters and get reports.”
Keyhole
Keyhole is another real-time social media analytics tool that allows you to track hashtags and keywords across multiple social networks. With Keyhole, analyzing multiple profiles, brand mentions, campaigns, and influencers becomes simple. By having all the data in one place, you can make strategically important social media decisions and boost your social media and websites’ conversion rates. This is what they offer to their users when it comes to hashtags:
- Hashtag tracking. Find trending topics and relevant hashtags to be ahead.
- Influencer research. Identify the top influencers in your industry by hashtags, analyze their profiles, and assess collaboration opportunities.
- Social listening. Ensure you don’t miss any direct and indirect brand mentions and gain access to all relevant hashtags.
- Quick trends. Stay up-to-date with new trends and tendencies by leveraging AI-driven tools and deep filtering.
- Reporting. Receive data reports containing all hashtags, keywords, and mentions on social media platforms.
Price
There are 4 tiers available:
- Individual (starting at $89 per month)
- Team (starting at $189 per month)
- Pro (starting at $259 per month)
- Advanced (starting at $549 per month)
“I like how easy it is to generate my analytics report for my social media channels. The hashtag tracker is particularly useful and the insights have proven to be of great use for our campaign.”
Hashtagify
Hashtagify is an advanced hashtag-tracking tool for marketers and social media communicators. You can use this tool to effortlessly search for Twitter and Instagram trends, discover relevant hashtag suggestions, identify influencers, and enhance your marketing strategy. Here are the best hashtag related features from Hashtagify:
- Hashtags Finder (hashtag search engine). To leverage this feature, you’ll simply have to paste a hashtag into a search bar. Thus you’ll get access to a comprehensive analysis of its popularity, usage frequency, and related keywords.
- Popular. Discover the most popular hashtags by language (top 30 hashtags: hot now, last week’s top 30 hashtags, and last month’s most popular hashtags).
- My Hashtags. Monitor the performance of your hashtags, keep track of any conversations on Twitter and Instagram, and see your campaign’s results in well structured reports.
- My Users: Enhance your Twitter messages using instant suggestions right while writing, examine statistics, and boost engagement.
Price
Not available on their website.
“Great information, reports, and a comparison of different hashtags. I like the bubbles that graphically illustrate similar hashtags and which ones have the greatest reach.”
Inflact
A free Instagram hashtag tracker, Inflact, is a real gem for social media marketers. Find the best hashtags, create hashtag lists, and specify a search for your locations. Among their best features are:
- Generate by keyword. Insert keywords and get a hashtag based on it.
- Generate by image. Simply add an image you’re going to post on Instagram and receive a customized list of hashtags for that one.
- Generate by post URL. Discover hashtags related to the post directly by the link.
- Hashtag Trends. Explore trending hashtags sorted by categories, such as “Today”, ”Last 7 Days”, “Last Month”, and “All Time”.
Price
Free
“I like that it gives you the possibility to mix your hashtags and get the maximum exposure on Instagram!”
Brand24
Being a social listening tool, Brand24 provides a lot of options to monitor mentions across social media, get reliable metrics, and track hashtags. When it comes to hashtags, they have quite a variety of tools that will help your business:
- Hashtag search: Find specific hashtags on Twitter, Instagram, and other social media platforms.
- Hashtag campaign management: Monitor and analyze your social media campaigns based on hashtags.
- Hashtag popularity & performance: Assess the popularity of specific hashtags in tweets/posts and analyze hashtag performance.
- Hashtag analytics: Measure social media reach by tracking hashtags and easily create automated reports and infographics about posts with hashtags.
- Sentiment analysis: Get a better understanding of your audience’s attitude toward the brand.
Price
There are four tiers available:
- Individual (starting at $79 per month)
- Team (starting at $149 per month)
- Pro (starting at $199 per month)
- Enterprise (starting at $399 per month)
“I found Brand24 super user friendly and clear to track the conversations about specific keywords. It’s very illustrative having the estimated social media reach of the user generated content campaign based on a hashtag and having a complete list of all the publications generated by the users.”
Display Purposes
What Display Purposes offers is a user friendly interface, primarily designed to provide you with relevant hashtags based on your request. Additionally, it filters out banned and low quality tags, ensuring you receive a refined hashtag list that can be effectively utilized for social media promotion. How cool is that?
- Hashtag generator: Find the most valuable hashtags for your posts.
- Scan profile: Identify targeted hashtags based on the content published on your profile.
Price: Free
“One thing that Display Purposes can do for you that not many other hashtags generators can right now is find hashtags that have been banned in the past, not right now. This is a great feature that can be incredibly helpful if you think that you have been shadowbanned by Instagram, but you’re not too sure.”
Agorapulse
Agorapulse is an all-in-one social media management solution. Access inbox with all social media communication, organize a content plan, discover main trends and popular ideas, and become an analytics guru with Agorapulse.
Features:
- Hashtag tracking: Set up hashtag searches on Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube to track brand-related hashtags and conduct a competitor analysis.
- Hashtag reporting: Receive comprehensive reports with data on hashtag usage and engagement.
- Hashtag publishing groups: Organize all the keywords you use in your posts into themed groups and add the entire group to a post with a single click.
- Social listening: Stay informed about your mentions of your brand and respond to them quickly.
Price
There are four tiers available:
- Standard (starting at $49 per month)
- Professional (starting at $79 per month)
- Advanced (starting at $119 per month)
- Custom
“Agorapulse’s features are always evolving, often at a faster rate than similar platforms. The community manager is extremely responsive to feedback from the Facebook group. Some of my favorite features are the saved hashtag banks, the abilities to schedule first comments, verify mentions, and resize images for different social channels within the Agorapulse platform. Pricing is fair.”
How To Choose The Best Hashtag Research Tool For Your Business?
With plenty of hashtag research tools presented on the market, selecting one that aligns best with your needs and goals can be challenging. To make an informed decision, it’s crucial to evaluate the product from various angles, including:
- Available features: Dlve into the tool’s capabilities, such as hashtag suggestions, tracking, and reporting functionality, to ensure they align with your specific requirements.
- Intuitive user interface: Opt for a tool with a user-friendly dashboard and straightforward navigation. The process of finding relevant hashtags and generating related ones should be easy.
- Price: Considering your budget, find a perfect solution that meets your needs and avoid overpaying for features you might not use.
- Reviews: A good practice before using a tool is viewing what people say about it. Insights from real users provide valuable perspective and assist you in making an informed choice.
By considering these factors, you can narrow down your options and select the best hashtag tool for your company.
Bonus: Hashtag Best Practices For Twitter, Instagram and TikTok
Hashtags are used on every social media network, but there are specific tips for each of them:
Twitter recommends using 1-2 hashtags per tweet as the best practice. You can add them at the start for focus, in the middle to highlight a keyword, or at the end for context. It’s also possible to use hashtags in comments, replies, and your profile bio. Additionally, it’s helpful to see Twitter’s trending hashtags and use Twitter’s advanced search if you want to create a new hashtag.
Try to not overwhelm a post with hashtags (3-5 are enough). It’s a good practice to include hashtags after a caption or in the comments section, but not in the middle (it can distract from the main idea you want to share and make the post less accessible to those who use text-to-speech readers). You can also mention brand-related hashtags in your profile bio which is huge.
Read Track Instagram with Determ
TikTok
Hashtags on TikTok usually are presented in video descriptions or on the Discover page. The optional number of hashtags in the post is 3-5. Among the best practices are using a mix of niche and trending hashtags and launching branded keyword challenges to interact with your followers and improve brand awareness.
As per insights from TikTok experts, the platform doesn’t just scan hashtags within your captions; it also analyzes text incorporated into the video itself, factoring it into the content ranking. No proves here, just a guess to be checked.
Uncover Insights With The Best Hashtag Research Tool
First used in 2007, hashtags continue to play a crucial role in drawing attention to your social media content (70% of the most used hashtags on Instagram are branded). Employing a hashtag research tool streamlines the process of finding relevant, trending, and highly effective hashtags.
If you’re a beginner, you can embark on your marketing journey with a free hashtag generator to establish your presence in the social media landscape. For businesses, the best hashtag tool should offer a wide range of features to effectively manage the brand’s social media performance.
What will work for an e-commerce email marketing agency, won’t perform well for a huge PR agency and vice versa. Ultimately, the choice is yours.
If you want to know how Determ can help you with your hashtag research, book a demo and try it out!
Andriy Zapisotskyi is a founder of GrowthMate – a SEO marketing agency that helps small and mid-size brands grow in SERP and generate more revenue. Andriy loves to mentor startups and network with people. Running is his hobby and he enjoys discovering new places. Connect with Andriy on Linkedin.
