If you’re a brand or an agency, you should be able to answer this one for me. Think of a really cool brand hashtag you’ve seen go viral on social media. It could be promoting a product, a lifestyle, a business, or even a social cause backed by one. It could even be a brand slogan.
Thought of one? Great. Chances are it’s got one of these three things going for it.
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The concept was interesting.
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The messaging was catchy.
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It got people participating.
Sometimes when the marketing gods align, brands nail all of these. But that is a blog post for another day. Today we’ll look at not how you build a great hashtag—which by the way, you can do with our free tool—but rather, how to make the most of your brand hashtag.
An average brand today uses dozens of website optimization tools, adding all the bells and whistles to help them engage visitors, earn their emails with discount coupons, and show them what their brand can offer. As the brand matures and grows, you’ll find that marketers start curating social media content on their website for more visibility and better branding. Hashtag campaigns and branded hashtags specifically, are prominently featured on a lot of savvy brand pages, be it D2Cs or even sporting teams. You’ll find all kinds of hashtag content.
Here are a few popular types of hashtag campaigns we've seen brands showcase on their websites, round the year.
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UGC content
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Product launches
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Contest posts
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Branded hashtags
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Event hashtags
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Topical/Category hashtags
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Trend hashtags
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Multi-channel content
If done well, these could be jump-off points to spark conversations with your audience and at the same time, help you scale your marketing efforts. And it doesn’t have to stop with just your website or online store. Businesses can aggregate hashtag content at live events like conferences and games, on large digital displays or small portable screens in order to engage visitors and fans.
So, how do you market your hashtags?
If you’re still wondering about this, let’s look at some live examples of how they’re being curated by some successful brands that Flockler has partnered with.
1. With a little help from Flockler, Harvard University captures and showcases student experiences with branded hashtags
If you thought hashtag campaigns were only used by beauty and fashion brands selling you day-and-night creams, think again. Higher education marketers use social aggregator tools in quite imaginative ways too.
Harvard University, for example, captures commencement ceremonies , each ceremony with its dedicated hashtag. Content tagged with a dedicated hashtag for each ceremony is then shown on unique pages on their website with the help of Flockler, getting not just students but also their relatives to engage and share the experience and relive it later. Flockler is so light and easy to use, it takes literal seconds to set up a new hashtag feed from scratch.
2. Sohome plugs Flockler’s Instagram hashtag feed to boost product sales
Sohome Living, finds product feeds fuelled by a brand hashtag to be a perfect driving force behind their social content curation. With Flockler’s tight integration to Instagram, Sohome was able to display the best of its product feed pulled from its hashtag content and display it on their homepage as well as product pages to boost sales.
The customized hashtag feed came with a purchase-intent CTA like ‘Shop the look’ that sits right below a carousel of product images and videos that users have uploaded with their hashtag. This boosted not just social proof for the brand, but also on-page sales.Flockler’s endlessly customizable layouts and easy-to-use tools were both able to help set Sohome up for success in its hashtag aggregation strategy.
3. Football club Bayer 04 Leverkusen builds community with Flockler’s social walls
Flockler doesn’t help brands showcase cool products, it also helps bring communities together. Bayer 04 Leverkusen football club is one of them. The Bundesliga league’s mainstay found really great ways to leverage Flockler’s social walls to create a wonderfully dynamic homepage and player pages which channels respective social media updates.
And on match days, the website turns into a live update feed sourced from all across its social media channels. The team maximized its individual players’ reach and branding, and was able to increase its sponsors while building a community of fans who engage with them.
If you want to know how hashtag feeds can benefit different business categories, here’s a quick set of pointers we threw together for your reference.
How hashtag feeds boost your business by category
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D2C & Ecommerce
Popular use-case: User-Generated Content (UGC)
Strategy: Brands can display user-generated images and video content featuring the D2C brand, once they’re tagged under relevant hashtags.
What’s the ROI: UGC can help you boost conversion rates by as much as 29% by building authenticity and trust, which are good foundations for customer loyalty and increased profitability.
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Educational institutions
Popular use-case: Branding & Visibility for campus activities
Strategy: Run a live feed of campus activities and events like recruitment fairs, message-board important updates on policy changes and changes in schedule.
What’s the ROI: Creating visibility and generating more sign-ups and participation for campus activities and events, by promoting the hashtag campaigns on the university website, for example.
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Travel and Tourism
Popular use-case: Bookings and inquiries
Strategy: Create inspo-galleries with travel content posted by customers using your brand hashtag, or generate interest about a location that you serve by curating content from the location hashtag.
What’s the ROI: Boost website engagement among visitors and optimize conversion activities like bookings and inquiries, leading to sales.
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Sports teams
Popular use-case: Branding & Promotion
Strategy: Run a live feed of social content on a jumbotron during live sporting events, sell team gear through product feeds on your website, and share player related updates and merch drops on not just homepage but dedicated team pages to keep engagement high on the team’s site.
What’s the ROI: Create more engagement points and boost merchandise sales
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Fitness and wellness
Popular use-case: Community building
Strategy: Curate posts from users and followers who are on their fitness journeys by encouraging them to use your hashtags which you can use to filter the content to display on your website to inspire visitors.
What’s the ROI: Boost share of voice in popular social media discussions like fitness journeys and increase direct revenue from sign-ups and subscriptions, bolstered by social participation and buzz.
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Beauty and fashion
Popular use-case: Showcasing influencer marketing
Strategy: Display posts like product trial and unboxing to review videos posted by influencers and brand champions using the brand hashtag, right on the website.
What’s the ROI: Increase in traffic and brand trust as influencer content adds a degree of credibility and trust. This also leads to higher direct conversions like product inquiries and online sales.
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Events and Conferences
Popular use-case: Live social media walls
Strategy: Show a live social media feed to be displayed on screens during events, using a hashtag aggregator. This could be images and videos being posted by organizers and attendees.
What’s the ROI: Boosting attendee engagement and participation, increasing event satisfaction rate. Parallely, this could also help create more social media buzz, mentions, and engagement at events..
Now that you have some idea of how hashtag aggregation can be a solid and consistent update routine for your brand, this leads us to the next question.
How to get more views and engagement with hashtags
There is a lot you can do creatively as a brand or agency setting up a website for success with a well-placed hashtag stream. Here are some helpful resources that can help you. These should guide through the process of creating hashtags, using them, presenting them on your website or webshop.
1. Hashtag research tools and helpful tips for brands to win using hashtags
2. Different types of website layouts on which you can build hashtag feeds.
3. Here’s an updated list of UGC stats in 2024 for some contextual reading
If you missed it before, here’s our free hashtag generator to help you whip up relevant hashtags for your Instagram content instantly, with related hashtags and individual popularity scores for each you can easily embed on your content.
With that out of the way, let’s deep-dive into the different options available to help you find a hashtag aggregator app that can align best with your needs, depending on whether you’re a brand or an agency and the specific marketing requirements you may have. Take a look at our list.
A definitive list of the best Hashtag Aggregator Tools in 2024
Social media aggregators are available now aplenty. But the right blend of features that can help your business boost brand visibility and get an uptick on conversions are important. This has to ideally be achieved with minimal technical intervention from your side, and a lot of customizability to ensure that whatever widget you throw into your website fits into your brand’s visual style and adds to your tone.
Once these preliminary checks are done, you can start thinking of larger decision factors like integrations and pricing. Let’s take a look at some tools that pack hashtag aggregation capabilities.
1. Flockler
Flockler is a social media aggregator with UGC-curation and review management as well, finding use with growing brands and agencies across industries from education and sports, to travel and fitness. With unlimited layouts and unlimited views, Flockler prices not on the customizations you can make or the traffic you receive, but simply on the no. of sources connected.
The price point is comparatively higher starting at $110 a month, but what you get for that price is plenty. Hands-on support if you want customization for your hashtag feeds, full mobile-compatibility, and a visually stunning no-code platform that helps build a brand feed in less than 30 seconds with simple drag-and-drop tools.
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2. Taggbox
With a large stack of features, enterprise-level plans, and room for customizability, Taggbox is best suited for agencies with a larger portfolio of clients requiring more hands-on chat and phone support as they scale their plan.
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3. Juicer
Juicer is a social wall aggregator that integrates with a large number of social platforms and helps curate hashtags from multiple channels. Its higher plans get priority support, more streams, and less time-lag in data refreshes while its lower plans load data much slower (once an hour) and also cap the number of views a month as well.
Most of these are common limitations, but the real blocker here is the number of feeds (active content widgets placed across the website) are also limited to just 3, unless you go for their enterprise plan.
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4. Walls.io
This tool does exceptionally well in creating social walls for live events like conferences and live sports, as they also have a 30-day event pass you can sign up to if you are using the platform for specific occasions. But their year-round plans can be more expensive, while lacking some core functionality the other tools pack.
For instance, even their starter plan at $55 only refreshes data once an hour, making it untenable for brands and agencies that want a live curation of hashtagged campaigns, conversations, or brand content to stream on their website, without a lag.
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5. Onstipe
Starting at an easy price-point of $8 a month, Onstipe offers an alternative to brands looking for definitive use-cases like social wall aggregation on websites. Auto-moderation is an attractive feature of this tool for brands and small agencies.
Its feature-set is great for content aggregation, where it falls short is with brands or agencies who have legacy content and long-term campaigns, since switching social feeds could mean losing evergreen content displayed on-site.
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6. Curator
Curator does exactly what its name promises, it aggregates social media content for websites and on premise this works well for small agencies and brands with straightforward requirements.
As a business scales and the number of feeds grow, user management features like tracking and analytics are not use-cases Curator is able to solve for in a comprehensive manner.
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Quantifying ROI from your website’s hashtag feeds
It’s important to measure the value that your hashtag feeds bring, in order to deploy them better in the future. Measuring the ROI of a hashtag aggregator involves measuring key performance indicators (KPIs) before and after implementing them on a brand or agency’s website. The common KPIs you can look out based on your use-case are:
1. Conversion spike on webshops
Track changes in conversion rates on pages that feature products aggregated under brand hashtags or UGC posts with a shopping CTA under it. Jump-off metrics to look at here are CTA clicks, and growth in website-led conversion numbers.
2. Engagement Metrics
For brands that feature UGC and brand content via hashtag streams at places like sporting events and conferences, the ROI is measured in short-term via increased social media engagements like mentions, likes, shares, and comments, and uptick in follower numbers.
3. Website metrics
Monitor changes in traffic behavior to see how long the audience’s time spent on site has increased after curating brand content via hashtag streams. Bounce rate, and average time spent on site are immediate metrics to look at.
4. Change in customer acquisition costs (CAC)
For brands using hashtag feeds to showcase influencer or community content, calculate any fluctuations in CAC contributed by enhanced trust and engagement from aggregated content. This metric has to be calculated over a longer period than others, with a quarter-on-quarter comparison.
These metrics can help you start seeing the drip-down benefits your marketing enhancements have on your overall business, and how a simple hashtag wall on your website or your storefront, or your conference - can go a mile in building a rapport with your audience.
By leveraging a hashtag aggregator, businesses can harness the power of social proof, audience engagement, and product curation more effectively to drive higher ROI across their marketing initiatives.
Do you have 30 seconds to build a hashtag feed for your website? Try it with Flockler.
We’ve been helping brands and agencies of all sizes maximize everything from audience engagement to sales campaigns with our social media aggregator products. We have a fantastic support team that can take care of all your customization requests for no added cost as well.
It’s super easy to set up by yourself, but if you’d still like a product demo, you can get started here.
