Adding a hashtag to your social media feeds has been a proven method to increase engagement—just take a look at these stats.

The trick is to find that perfect hashtag that is relevant to your brand and has high engagement potential. It's like choosing the right keyword for SEO, high search volume and spot-on relevance make all the difference. If discovering the right hashtags is half the effort, the other half is measuring the effectiveness of these hashtags. This is where Hashtag analytics comes in, it helps monitor hashtag effectiveness and optimizing your content strategy accordingly.

Let’s learn more about hashtag analytics, how they can help your brand and the right hashtag analytics tools you can use to enhance your marketing efforts

What is hashtag analytics?

Hashtag analytics tracks and monitors a collection of metrics that provide information about the performance of branded or other hashtags on each social media platform. Hashtag analytics is a part of social media analytics that helps understand the used hashtags' effectiveness for social media marketing.

There are many permutations and combinations of hashtag usage as each social platform demands a different strategy. For example, on some platforms, 2-3 hashtags are sufficient (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter), but on others (Instagram & TikTok), you need many more hashtags per post.

Hashtag analysis clears all the air around these possibilities, and helps you discover the following.

• What is the potential to increase brand awareness via hashtags

• What type of hashtags to use to amplify product reach

• What hashtags to use for generating traction for UGC campaigns

Take a look at Harvard University's hashtag usage

Harvard University uses hashtags actively on Instagram to post about different events. They have an adopted strategy for hashtags and use not more than a couple of (relevant) hashtags per post. They use hashtag feeds to showcase events like:

• Welcome day 

• Sports events 

• Alumni and Convocation day

But on X (formerly Twitter), they do not use any hashtags in the majority of the tweets. You can see the stark difference in their approach. What they also do differently is that they also showcase the curated hashtag content on the website using the Flockler widget to generate more engaged website sessions.

This social feed on their website is popularly called a ‘social media wall’. A social media wall is very effective for showcasing your strong social media presence on your website for new visitors.

Many famous brands from different industries are using social media walls to integrate real-life experiences, testimonials, product updates, etc on their websites. Some of the names include GoPro, Somerset Grill Company, UNDRDOG ATHLETIX, HL Cruises, and the New Zealand National Cricket Team.

Here are examples of 15 brands that add Instagram widgets to their websites.

As Jan Kiesewalter, Head of Interactive Experiences at 247GRAD says,

‘If I put effort into my social media content, it's usually worth not only having this content take place on Instagram and other channels, but also showing it on the website.’

Important hashtags to track

Now that we’ve established the importance of hashtag analytics and how your brand hashtags can be repurposed, let's look at which ones work best. Today, hashtags are important for a brand’s discoverability and giving the right context to your content. The key is using the right hashtags that match your tone, brand voice, and messaging. But how do you go about finding a balance between what’s relevant to your brand and what works?

Let’s look at 6 categories of hashtags that help with engagement.

1. Location Hashtags
 Location hashtags tag content to a specific place, such as a city, neighborhood, or landmark. These hashtags help users  discover posts related to a particular area, making them ideal for businesses and influencers aiming to attract local audiences.

For instance, #GoldenGateBridge is used by tourists, locals, or businesses targeting those in the vicinity. Location hashtags are effective in enhancing the visibility of posts to users searching for content or services within a specific geographic region, thereby increasing local engagement and potentially driving foot traffic to physical locations. 

2. Event Hashtags

Event hashtags are used to boost content related to events like conferences, concerts, sports games, or festivals. These hashtags enable participants and attendees to connect, share experiences, and follow updates in real-time.

Events hashtags often form a community and create an active buzz for the event. For example, #Coachella2024 brings out all the relevant posts of the Coachella event. This hashtag catches feeds from celebrities, influencers, and other participants leading to strong marketing for the event.

You’ll also notice that events go over and above to boost engagement by creating social walls that relay all attendee content that uses the event’s hashtag. Take a look at the example here.

Social media walls are a credible choice for making your events more engaging. In events, you can add social media walls on multiple locations in the venue, such as – hallways, the main screen or jumbotrons, the lobby, the stage area, live streaming, etc. You can use social walls to display every single critical update, run contests, and display real-time reactions and results.

3. Branded Hashtags
Branded hashtags are unique to a company or product and are used to promote and track brand-specific content. These hashtags are often created by brands to encourage user-generated content, brand recognition, and engagement.

For example, Coca-Cola encouraged people to share their personalized bottles on social media using the hashtag #ShareaCoke. This user-generated content created a social phenomenon where people participated actively.

4. Campaign Hashtags
Campaign or ad hashtags are created for specific marketing campaigns or advertising efforts. These hashtags help in tracking the performance and reach of a particular campaign, making it easier to measure its impact.

For example, Disney’s #ShareYourEars campaign encouraged fans to post photos with Mickey Mouse ears on social media. Each post tagged with #ShareYourEars unlocks a $5 donation to Make-A-Wish, aiming to raise $1 million to support children with life-threatening illnesses.

5. Trending Hashtags
These are hashtags popular at a given moment, often related to current events, news, or viral content—anything that’s topical. These hashtags appear prominently on social media platforms and attract high user engagement.

The #Paris2024 hashtag is trending currently as excitement builds for the upcoming Paris 2024 Olympics. It connects fans, athletes, and organizers, fostering engagement, sharing updates, and celebrating the anticipation of this globally significant sporting event.

6. Content Hashtags

Content hashtags describe the subject or theme of the post, helping users discover content based on their interests. These hashtags are specific to the content’s nature, such as #TravelPhotography, #HealthyRecipes, or #FitnessTips.

Top hashtag analytics tools

Many social media management tools offer the right sets of tools for in-depth hashtag analytics, know our top five.

1. Talkwalker 

Talkware tracks hashtags for 10+ social networks including websites, blogs, and forums. It measures the success of your used hashtags and the people’s sentiment towards it. While complete access to the platform requires investment, it provides a free tool called Free Social Search including a free hashtag tracker and hashtag analyzer.

2. Sprout Social

Sprout Social enables hashtag analysis in one dashboard from different platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and YouTube. The Sprout Social Trends Report tracks your audience's hashtag usage, performance, and relevant topics, helping you build a content strategy aligned with their interests. It also offers a social listening tool to uncover customer sentiments and critical competitor insights.

3. Hootsuite

Hootsuite analytics offers trending hashtag breakdowns to identify top-performing hashtags in your niche, which you can easily copy and paste. It also allows you to know your competitors’ hashtag performance. You will know which hashtags were a hit for your competitors gaining the most comments and engagement.

4. Keyhole

Keyhole offers real-time hashtag insights across multiple social networks including TikTok, Twitter Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn in a single dashboard. It enables you to compare all your influencers’ and competitors' accounts with hashtag tracking. It also provides you with hashtag historical reports.

5. Brand24

Brand24 provides you with hashtag monitoring and hashtag analytics tools for measuring your content performance on platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Twitch, Quora, TikTok, Telegram, and YouTube. Brand 24 gives you insights into the key metrics such as volume of mentions, social media reach, engagement volume, sentiment analysis, other popular hashtags, and discussion context.

How to do hashtag analysis?

You can get the basic hashtag insights from each platform’s in-built tool but they are not enough. For example, with

X (formerly Twitter) hashtag analytics

You definitely need a third-party tool to dig deep for Twitter hashtag analytics as Twitter only offers basic and a couple of in-built functionalities i.e,

• Trending hashtags on the bottom-right side

• Search function to find hashtags

Instagram hashtag analytics

You can track Instagram hashtags with the app's built-in tool, Instagram Insights. It is only for business accounts and is free to use. It offers broader and basic data on hashtag performance. Learn more from here.  An Instagram hashtag analytics tool provides detailed more detailed insights and reporting about hashtag performance, trends, competitors' usage, and sentiments.

LinkedIn hashtag analytics

On LinkedIn, there are many ways you can search for hashtags for example

• You can search any hashtag to find out relevant content coming out for the search.

• You can use the LinkedIn analytics dashboard to monitor the hashtags.

• You can use the link “https://www.linkedin.com/feed/hashtag/xyz/” to see the number of followers for any hashtag. It helps you know if the hashtag holds a good potential for better reach and search.

• You can use the free LinkedIn Hashtag Analytics extension for Chrome.

Some other ways to analyze hashtags on LinkedIn

• You can watch what hashtags competitors are using.

• Keep an eye on what hashtags are used in trending posts.

• See what related hashtags are used.

However, it demands a lot of work and effort. We suggest you keep it simple with a hashtag analytics tool.

Recommended read: LinkedIn Content Marketing Strategy: Ideas and Examples

TikTok hashtag analytics

TikTok’s internal analytics provide basic insights like the number of views, trending sounds, and engagement associated with specific hashtags, which is not enough.

Here’s how to perform hashtag analysis for each platform

Once you select a hashtag analytics tool, the steps become comparatively easy for each platform.

Step 1: Select an effective hashtag analysis tool.

Step 2: Integrate your social account to the analytics tool.

Step 3: Navigate to the hashtag analytics section within the tool.

Step 4: Input the hashtags you want to analyze. You can also track trending or suggested hashtags provided by the tool.

Step 5: Dive into the hashtag data to review all important metrics and gain insights into hashtag performance.

Step 6: Create a social media strategy accordingly.

Step 7: Optimize your social media content with the detailed reports offered by the tool. For every platform, there are some important metrics to analyze hashtags including:

• Volume of mentions

• Social media reach

• Engagement

• Sentiment

• Influence

• Active social media authors

• Presence

• Hashtag reputation

• Hashtag popularity

How to use Flockler for hashtag analytics?

Flocker helps you embed social walls with zero tech skills requirements. It provides custom design features for your social wall layout and additional products required for creating a great social wall, including tools to create a fantastic experience at your event or on your website.

• Collecting customer reviews

• UGC rights management

• Shopify shoppable feeds

• Social media analytics

All Flockler subscriptions include the Analytics tab showing the number of views and engagement for each embedded layout (Wall, Grid, Carousel, and Slideshow). You can also connect your Flockler layout with Google Analytics to track, for example, clicks of a specific element on the social wall, grid, and carousel layouts.

In addition, you get Flockler’s Social Analytics add-on to understand the number of likes and comments on Instagram, FB, and X (formerly Twitter).

Here is a step-by-step guide on how to use Flocker for hashtag analytics

Step 1: Use a good social media management tool that offers credible hashtag analytics features to understand the most impactful and relevant hashtags for your niche.

Step 2: Create content based on these hashtags and post them on your respective social media platform.

Step 3: Use Flockler to show content from these hashtags from your brand, influencers, or select users.

Here’s how you do it in 4 easy steps🙂

• Sign up to your Flocker account.

• Create your social media feed by collecting the social media posts from multiple accounts, and channels using specific hashtags. Once the posts show up on that hashtag, you can select multiple posts for the social feed.
   

• Choose the layout design to display your content on your website or digital screen. Flocker offers four different layouts for your social media feed: Social Wall, Grid, Carousel, and Slideshow. Please select one of them. 
   

• Copy and paste the embed code to any website, intranet, or digital platform. 
   

• Feel free to contact our friendly customer success team to help you if you get stuck because Flockler works with all digital platforms.
  
  Step 4: Monitor the best-performing hashtags, influencers, and users for the hashtags you use in your feeds with Flocker’s social analytics tool.
  
  With Flocker’s social analytics, you will understand your content’s performance of unlimited campaigns across multiple social media channels and hashtag campaigns. It measures the number of posts, likes, and comments on Instagram, Facebook, and X (formerly Twitter).
  
  With social media analytics, you will get
   

• List of your top content

• List of most popular and influential participants of hashtag campaigns

• Understand the key metrics of X, Facebook, and Instagram posts you've aggregated with Flockler's Automated Feeds.

• Excel and PDF export

• Daily updates

• Unlimited campaigns

GoPro is using Flocker for embedding hashtag campaigns

GoPro, an industry leader in camera technology, uses dynamic social media campaigns & competitions to increase engagement. One such campaign is the “GoPro Awards.” In this, they encourage more and more people to participate and submit a video or image of the things they love to do.

With Floker, GoPro collects all the social media posts (from multiple accounts) with #GoProAwards and displays them on their website in a beautiful layout for threefold benefits:

• To increase brand awareness

• To form a community and increase the participation rate

• To enhance the credibility of their product

FAQ

• What is hashtag analysis?

Hashtag analysis is the exercise of tracking and analyzing performance of various hashtags to get an understanding into which ones are performing better across social media platforms. It makes one appraise how effective a hashtag could be for social media marketing, leading to finding the most befitting hashtags and optimizing such for increased visibility and audience engagement for brands.

• How can you measure hashtag performance?

Some of the social media platforms offer in-built service of social media analytics which allows you to know the basics of your hashtag performance. But if you run a business, only a hashtag-tracking tool will help you make a difference. These tools once integrated with your account, will automatically monitor your hashtag performance and provide you with in-depth data.

• How can I check the number of times a hashtag has been used?

You have to check if the social media platform that you are using offers an in-built service for this. If not, use a hashtag analytics tool to know every granular insight related to hashtags.