20 Aug 2024 | By - Sudha Mariappan

online visibility to greater lengths. But what exactly is hashtag analytics, and why is it so critical to your social media strategy?

What is Hashtag Analytics?

Since social media is a major part of brand building and customer engagement, hashtags extend Hashtag analytics refers to the process in which a user traces and analyzes the performance of hashtags on different social media platforms. It gives extremely resourceful insights into the reach, engagement, and overall performance of your hashtags, so that you can fine-tune content to maximize online presence.

Now, let’s break it down a bit more.

Hashtags are the signposts across a social media landscape. When including a hashtag in your post, you are effectively tagging it with a keyword or phrase identifying the category under which your content falls in a greater conversation. If you are a digital marketing agency posting about SEO strategies, adding #SEO, #DigitalMarketing, or #ContentStrategy allows users interested in such topics to find your post.

However, it's not just about adding any hashtag. The way a hashtag can resonate with the target audience, be used frequently over a period, and generate a considerable amount of engagement is what really drives its effectiveness.

This becomes the role of hashtag analytics, which is to monitor how your hashtags are doing so that you will know what's working and what's not.

In other words, hashtag analytics is something no digital marketer's toolbox should be without. It is more than just keeping the digits; it tells you so much about your audience and helps in content strategy optimization to drive home data-driven decisions for real results.

Whether you're a small business looking to build some awareness or a large enterprise looking to dominate your industry, hashtag analytics can help you succeed within the fiercely competitive environment of social media by giving you that needed insight.

Read Also: Social Media for Your Small Business

How to Track Hashtags Effectively:

Any marketer seeking to ensure a perfect flow of their social media strategy needs to master the key skill of tracking hashtags. Below, I will outline some tactics to monitor and analyze your hashtag performance across these different platforms.

1. Built-in Platform Analytics:

The first step in effectively tracking your hashtags is to leverage the analytics of most social media platforms. Most of them have in-depth analytics like Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, showing how your hashtags are really improving in terms of performance.

Instagram Insights: This is an in-built analytics tool on Instagram that enables a user to track performance for every single post, including reach and impressions of the hashtags used.

You'll be able to see how many people found your post through that particular hashtag and analyze what kind of engagement it generates. These are very important in making you know which ones work best to drive visibility and engagement on Instagram.

Twitter Analytics: Twitter has a really great analytics tool that will give you all the details on how well your tweets are doing, right down to the reach, impression, and even the engagement metrics of your hashtags.

Moreover, Twitter's real-time nature allows one to perfectly view trending hashtag performance and engage your audience at that time.

You'll be able to view data that shows which of your hashtags is most engaging and change your strategy accordingly based on this information.

LinkedIn Analytics: The platform's analytics will show how well your posts are doing and the reach and engagement from hashtags. This totally makes sense, as the platform is professionally used for networking.

Therefore, a business will find it very effective in tracking industry-specific hashtags to know about their relevance to the audience better.

It may also give you demographic insights with regard to the job title, industry, and location that are characteristic of your target audience, thereby helping in customizing such content.

Read Also: 5 ways to use data analytics to improve your marketing campaigns.

2. Using Dedicated Hashtag Tracking Tools:

Most of the time, the built-in analytics are useful but limited toward how deep and broad the data it provides might be. In such a case, dedicated hashtag tracking tools come in handy. They do offer in-depth analytics and will allow you to track multiple hashtags across several platforms simultaneously.

Keyhole: Among the popular hashtag tracking tools, Keyhole has opened up user access to real-time information about your hashtag performance. Presenting reach, impressions, engagement, and sentiment analysis, one is apt to understand how their hashtags are performing across different platforms. Keyhole brings historical data for easy performance tracking over time and spotting trends.

Hashtagify: Hashtagify is a tool with more focus on Twitter and Instagram. It lets you access extended data on the popularity and performance of hashtags, related tags, trends, and top influencers for tags associated with the hashtags you are researching. It also has a great "custom suggestions" feature, which based on your content and audience suggests new hashtags.

3. Reach and Impressions:

While you’re tracking hashtags, you need to pay attention to the reach and impressions that they generate. The reach describes the number of unique users who view your post, while the impression relates to the total number of times that it is viewed. These metrics give a clear insight into how far your hashtags could go.

Reach is a measure of how many unique users your hashtag helps to expose your content to. The more your reach, the more likely it's because your hashtag is helping your content go in front of way more people to increase awareness and engagement.

It is the total view count for your content, including multiple views by users. With impressions, you can even tell how often your content is being seen and gain ideas of how well your hashtags are at getting you that visibility in the first place.

Read Also: Increase visitor engagement with Google Analytics and maximize conversions.

4. Engagement and Interactions:

These provide very handy metrics for engagement in terms of likes, comments, shares, and retweets, which indicate how your audience is engaging with your content. With all of these interactions, you are able to know those hashtags that really engage your audience and foster meaningful engagement.

Likes and Comments: The number of likes and comments you get from posting allows you to understand how your audience is feeling about the kind of content you are sharing. A higher quantity of likes and positive comments means that your hashtags engage your audience.

Shares and Retweets: Shares and retweets are particularly key metrics since they prove that a user is actually amplifying your content. Once the information gets shared or retweeted, the user delivers it to their followers to increase the reach and visibility of a user's hashtags.

CTR stands for Click-Through Rate, essentially the measure of how many users clicked on the link in your post relative to total views. One can track the CTR of the posts to know better whether the hashtags will help in the drive of traffic towards a website or landing pages eventually.

5. Audience Demographics:

Users who use the hashtags are just as important as how the hashtags are used. Hashtag analytics tools can provide more detailed information about your demographic audience in terms of age, gender, location, and other interests. The knowledge of this information will be very valuable in order to better create content and hashtags for the target audience.

The following might impact the performance of your content.
• Age and Gender: A better appreciation of the age as well as gender composition of the audience will show specific content for different age groups, and the nature of content would be different. For example, one may consider using overwhelmingly trending and very current hashtags when the audience targeted comprises a younger generation.
• Location: The knowledge of where your audience is at will provide you with the ability to cater to some exact regions or markets. For example, if you have a significant segment of your audience residing in India, then region-specific hashtags that are popular in the area could be the way to go.

How Hashtag Analytics Works on Different Platforms:

Different social media have different algorithms, user behaviors, and features that would affect how hashtags work. For a lot of strategies to work on social media, you need to know how their hashtag analytics work.

1. Instagram:

Instagram is a visual network. Therefore, it means that it’s a platform where hashtags can be very important for discovery. It has more than 1 billion active monthly users, which makes it one of the biggest audiences for any brand or business.

Hashtag analytics is particularly important on Instagram since it will increase the views on your posts and attract new followers.

Instagram Insights: Using Insights, you will be able to track the performance of your posts, which is all about the reach, impressions, and engagement that your hashtags achieve. You can actually see how many people have come across your post through a particular hashtag, which is very important in knowing what generates the most traffic.

Hashtag Reach and Impressions: You can use Instagram hashtags in posts, stories, and even within the bio section. Reach and impressions will help you to easily find out how much your hashtags are extending the visibility of your content. For example, if a hashtag such as #InstaGood keeps driving high impressions, you may want to include it more often in your posts.

Engagement metrics: Instagram's algorithm favors posts that generate high engagement, such as likes, comments, and shares. You can make sense of those to understand which of them are really resonating with your audience and actually earning real engagement using your hashtag engagement metrics.

Demographic Insights: This also encapsulates demographic data regarding age, gender, and location of your followers. Having this information will allow you to mold your content and hashtags according to the preferences of your audience. For example, if you discover that you have a huge female following residing primarily in urban centers, you may choose to use hashtags that stand for concerns important for urban existence and lifestyles.

2. LinkedIn:

One of the professional networking platforms where hashtags go a long way in helping with content organization and discoverability by other professionals, hashtag analytics on LinkedIn is more focused on reach and engagement, but in a professional context.

LinkedIn Analytics: With its built-in analytics, the platform allows users to view post performance from reach to impressions and engagement metrics on the hashtags used.

Since LinkedIn is a professional platform, this is particularly valuable to see how industry-based hashtags are relating to the target audience.

Professional Reach and Engagement: Hashtags promote your content to get a larger professional audience on LinkedIn. In this way, you’ll reach potential clients, partners, even employees.

Hashtag link tracking also helps you understand which topics are driving visibility and engagement in the industry.

Demographic Insights: LinkedIn analytics provides demographic details in terms of the title, industry, and location of the audience. This kind of information can be very useful in customizing your content and hashtags to the preferences of your audience.

For example, if your analytic information indicates that most of your audience primarily comes from people in the marketing sector, you would want to use hashtags like #MarketingTips or #DigitalStrategy.

Content Categorization: You can follow specific hashtags on LinkedIn, which facilitates the ability to know what content is relevant to their interest. By having a look into the performance of your hashtags, you can ensure that your content is rightly categorized and reaches the target audience.

3. Twitter:

Twitter is a real-time platform, and hence the hashtags may trend really fast and reach many within a very short time. The real-time nature of Twitter is just perfect for tracking trending hashtag performance and engaging your audience in the now.

Twitter Analytics: Twitter has an extremely neat analytics tool that can actually show precisely how users are engaging with your tweets, even down to the reach, impression, and engagement metrics for your hashtags. You will know which hashtag is most driving the engagement by analyzing this data.

Real-Time Tracking: One of the very unique things about Twitter is its real-time nature. Hashtags might start trending within minutes, so it is actually imperative to track in real time.

Twitter Analytics empowers you with the ability to track the performance of your hashtags while they are being used, hence giving you the power to engage with your audience in real time.

Hashtag Trends: Twitter's trending topics section brings you a flavor of what's hot at present time. Looking at trending hashtags will show you opportunities for joining larger conversations to increase the visibility of one's content.

Competitive Analysis: Twitter will show you how your hashtags stack up against others. The feature gives you a competitive advantage to know which of the hashtags will yield more engagement within your industry.

For example, if a competitor's hashtag is trending, you might consider using a similar hashtag to ride some of the momentum.

Engagement Metrics: Retweets, likes, and mentions are some of the engagement metrics on Twitter that help get an idea of how your audience is engaging with your content.

You can find out from these metrics which of the hashtags is really connecting you to the target audience and driving meaningful engagement.

If you are a digital marketer who really wants to optimize their social media strategy, then hashtag analytics is the way to go.

Analyzing and tracking hashtag performance is going to be a significant data set to bring improvement in your content strategy and drive superior results with the impact on your audience.

And whether using those inbuilt platform analytics or some dedicated hashtag tracking tools, one should really understand how their hashtags perform to maximize their online presence as a brand.

We are a team of experts highly skilled in hashtag analytics and social media marketing here at Ontogen Digital. Our professionals will help you find the best hashtags that fit your brands, track their performance, and optimize your content strategy for real results.

Connect with us at info@ontogendigital.com to learn more about our service offerings and how we enable you to be competitive within social media. Subscribe to us for more such blogs.