Hashtags were introduced to Twitter in 2007 as a way to categorize messages and allow users to easily find conversations of interest. It didn’t take long for hashtags themselves to start signaling puns, sarcasm, or providing additional context.
Sending out a key message in as little words as possible is a challenge for every marketer – and hashtags are a perfect medium to do just that. Hashtags can increase your customer engagement, help the target audience to find your brand, add context to your posts, you name it. Pretty much every campaign today has an associated hashtag, and many times the number of hashtag mentions is used is often a KPI for marketers.
But how to track hashtags, measure their performance, and find useful insights? To many, this is still a mystery. That’s why in Mediatoolkit we developed a tool that does all the hashtag tracking for you. It enables you to find all mentions and does all the measuring work. You can also create beautiful hashtag reports that look something like this. (The link contains a 6-page PDF file for the hashtag #NationalDonutDay, with various graphs you can find useful).
Or you can create Branded reports with your logo, colors, title description, etc. that will look something like this. (Report is made for presentation purposes only).
How To Start Tracking Hashtags
To start Tracking, you need a tool. Mediatoolkit tracks more than 100 million sources, including Twitter in real-time. So, if your hashtag gets tweeted, Mediatoolkit immediately tracks it down and shows it in the tool.
Plus you can get notifications via app, email, or Slack.
To start tracking your hashtag, all you need to do is type it in as a query.
If the hashtag has been used lately, you’ll see some results in seconds. If not, they’ll start appearing as soon as people start using your hashtag.
Being hungry while writing this, I decided to make a small analysis of currently trending #NationalDonutDay.
As you can see, all of the #hashtags are in one place. If you’re only interested in Twitter hashtag tracking, you can set the tool to track only Twitter. Also, you can filter your feed by source, so by clicking on Twitter as a preferred source, you’ll see only those mentions in the feed. Helpful if you have a team tracking and responding to the hashtag (as you should if you take your campaign seriously).
Keeping track of your hashtag mentions and responding when suitable is a great practice that increases engagement and improves chances of the campaign going viral. If someone is reading this while tracking #NationalDonutDay, keep in mind that yes, I would like a free donut and yes there is a chance that it will make you viral.
Plus, by tracking your hashtags, you can stumble upon great user-generated content that you can use for additional promotion.
How To Measure Hashtag Performance Using Mediatoolkit
Mediatoolkit’s analysis lets you or your client know what was the outcome of the campaign. To start with, let’s determine your own role in the company. Are you a global or local brand manager? Why should it matter?
As many of our customers find out really soon, the number of results can be overwhelming. Especially if hashtag only consists of a global brand’s name, or of a commonly used catchphrase. At the moment, #NationalDonutDay has more than 10000 mentions.
Lucky for me, not as many calories.
Now, we all have our donut favorites (personal favorite is All of them. Preferably at the same time. If possible, always.). But, usually, we don’t really work for ALL of the brands. In that case, editing our query a bit might take us a long way.
For no reason whatsoever I decided to play pretend as Dunkin Donuts brand manager (let me know if they’re hiring).
Setting up queries
Using Boolean operators, I decided to track all of the mentions of #nationaldonutday also mentioning #dunkindonuts and it’s variations “Dunkin donuts” or just “dunkin”.
I also could have added some often made typos like “dnukin”, “dunking” or “omgthisissugaryheaven” to make sure I catch all of the mentions. The number of keywords one query can include is actually unlimited, making it possible to truly narrow down or widen the search when necessary.
Analyizing reports
After listing all of the results, I can further analyze how the hashtag was used. In the reports section, I checked what’s been happening for the last week and unsurprisingly, June 1st had most of the mentions.
With a report showing the previous period too, we can see the week before (or a month before if that report would suit you more) had no mentions. With something event-based as #nationaldonutday, lack of previous mentions is to be expected. On the other hand, if you have a long term campaign, benchmarking against your own previous efforts is a foolproof way to get your campaign going.
Sentiment analysis
I also decided to check on sentiment, and guess what, it’s overwhelmingly positive. Negatives are mostly based on hating diabetes, but nevertheless, sentiment may be crucial in determining the success of a campaign. Thousands of mentions are all fun and game until you get the #McDstory type of situation. That’s why it’s important to pay attention to the sentiment of your hashtag over time. If the sentiment starts shifting to negative, you need to detect that right away and react accordingly.
Where do mentions come from?
As obvious in the report, it’s almost all USA.
Less obvious is that by clicking on any part of the map, I can see mentions from that country alone. You can also filter your mentions by language. So, if I’m mostly interested in tweets from Brazil, I can filter them out and additionally analyze engagement there.
Social media buzz
Speaking of engagement, do you usually check what social network brings you the most results?
Sure, some platforms are the primary networks for hashtag overloads. But take notice of how some act faster than others. Your audience may be quite the opposite, so it’s worthwhile to get some insights for future reference.
Attracting influencers
And finally, check out if some influencers caught on using the hashtag.
The number of times the hashtag was used can be greatly influenced by the most popular influencers using it. Without Tasty, I’d probably miss out on #nationaldonutday. Without a proper ambassador, I’ll probably miss out on your campaign too. So use influencers to make sure you’re getting the right coverage. And track it using Mediatoolkit.
Scanning the competition
Since Dunkin Donuts is not the only company selling donuts, by tracking #NationalDonutDay you can get a great insight into what your competitors are doing, and how are people reacting to them.
For example, some people may be unhappy with the service they got from your competitor(s). This is a great opportunity for you to jump in and offer them your donuts or whatever you’re selling. With being proactive, you just might get new customers!
Final thoughts
Using hashtags in your campaigns is important for boosting your brand’s awareness and visibility. It can help you reach wider audiences and spread word of mouth. Make sure your hashtags are memorable, engaging, and have a meaningful connection to your brand.
Also, as I said over and over in this blog, make sure you’re tracking the performance of your hashtag because of the valuable information you can get about your audience, competitors, and so much more.
Start tracking hashtags with Mediatoolkit:
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