The Complete Guide to Twitter Hashtag Analysis 2021

If you want to grow on social media, it’s important to have a solid strategy. But if your strategy doesn’t include hashtags, you are missing a lot of opportunities.

Hashtags are one of the best ways to increase your social media presence. But not every hashtag can help you do so. Developing a clear understanding of which hashtags to use can propel your brand to the next level.

Although, while brands understand the importance of hashtags, not everyone knows the benefits of hashtag analytics.

Tracking your brand’s social media performance can be a challenging task, even if you have just begun on social media. Researchers say, nearly 40% of businesses don’t track their social media performance. It is because of the lack of knowledge or the required resources to do so.

Hashtags have made it much easier to track your social media campaigns and measure performance. With the help of hashtag analytics, brands can easily monitor the KPIs in real-time and improvise strategies if needed. Also, this helps them better optimize their content to gain more exposure.

What is a hashtag?

Today, it’s very unlikely that a social media user doesn’t know what a hashtag is. When you add the (#) pound symbol before a keyword in your social media post, it becomes a hashtag.

A Twitter user, Chris Messina, created the first-ever hashtag, on August 23rd, 2007. Twitter, like every other social media platform, was facing an abundance of user-generated content. It became difficult for users to find relevant content. Amid this crisis, Chris Messina suggested the use of hashtags to categorize the content. Twitter soon integrated hashtags on their platform and the other social media platforms followed suit.

Important hashtag analysis metrics

Let’s look at some important hashtag analysis metrics that you should analyze before using a hashtag.

• Popularity: Similar to user-generated content, there is also an abundance of hashtags. But not every hashtag is popular among your target audience. If you want to reach your target audience, use hashtags that are popular. Using hashtags that users search the most can help you increase the SEO authority of your posts. Perform hashtag analysis and find the hashtags that have the most interactions. Just make sure to only use hashtags that apply to your domain.
• Reach: The visibility of the hashtag is another important metric that you should look out for. If you want more eyes on your social media posts, use the hashtags that have the most reach and impressions. The larger the audience a hashtag captures, the better chances of your post reaching new users.
• Engagement: The next and perhaps the most important metric is engagement. Reaching out to a large audience size is important, but if they do not engage, it amounts to nothing. Your end goal should be to increase interactions. Hashtag analysis can help you find the content that draws the most interactions. You can leverage these insights and post engaging content and increase engagement.
• Audience: The next important metric that you can leverage with the help of hashtag analysis is audience insights. Which audience group is using the hashtag? Do they align with your ideal consumer persona? With hashtag analysis, you can know which users are using or engaging with the hashtag. This can help you identify the right hashtags to use to reach your target audience.

Benefits of using Twitter hashtag analysis

When you use the right hashtags, you can give a tremendous boost to your social media presence and engagement. They are one of the most effective tools for increasing engagement and generating brand awareness.

Let’s dive deeper and check out the benefits of using hashtag analytics:

1. Optimize your content strategy

Performing hashtag analysis benefits your content strategy in two ways:

1. By performing hashtag analysis, you can find the top-performing hashtags related to your domain. You can use the most searchable and popular hashtags from your industry to get more eyes on the content you post.
2. Upon further analyzing the popular hashtags, you can identify the most popular content topics and media. You can then use these insights to create an effective and engaging content strategy. This will help you draw the attention of new followers and keep the existing ones engaged.

2. Know which users talk about you

Almost every brand or business has a branded hashtag of its own. Using hashtag analysis you can track every post that includes your branded hashtag. This can help you analyze the tweets of users and know their opinions of your brands.

One way you can leverage this is to enhance customer support. You can track people with bad user experiences with your brand and enhance your response time. This will help you retain customers by identifying and resolving their issues quickly. You can also get feedback on your content, your products, and services, or assess your brand image.

3. Monitor your marketing campaigns

While most brands use hashtags, not everyone measures their performance. So, they don’t know how well they perform. A splendid example of this is monitoring social media campaigns. With hashtag analysis, you can monitor the impact of your social media campaigns in real-time. If the performance KPIs are not as expected, you can improvise your strategies in real-time. 

4. Monitor your competitors

Using hashtag analytics, you can monitor the social media activities of your competitors. You can track the hashtags of your competitors to know the type of content they post. This way you can find new content ideas to add to your social strategy. Also, you get to implement proven strategies that can help you grow your brand while avoiding the mistakes your competitors make.

5. Find influencers in your industry or niche

Influencer marketing is right now the most used paid marketing channel by brands and businesses. But finding the right influencers to promote your brand can be difficult. Remember, not every influencer that engages with your brand can help you build an engaging follower base, regardless of their audience size. For example, you cannot ask a tech influencer to promote sports accessories.

Hashtag analysis can help you analyze the tweets related to your industry with the help of hashtags and keywords. With it, you can find the influencers in your industry that can influence the purchasing decisions of consumers. Further analyzing their profiles can help you pick the right influencers to collaborate with.

6. Generate Leads

Like I said earlier, hashtag analysis can help you analyze the tweets related to your brand. But it can also help you find users that are interested in your product or service. By tracking hashtags and brand mentions, you can identify potential customers for your brand.

How to perform hashtag analysis

Finding the right hashtags to use can become difficult, even for a seasoned marketer. One of the most effective ways to perform hashtag analysis is with a hashtag tracking tool. Here are three ways to find the most popular hashtags.

Twitter Search

Twitter comes with a search feature that can give you access to the most trending hashtags. Log into your Twitter account and click on the #Explore tab. Next, click on trending, it will give you a list of the most trending hashtags that are popular in your region. 

RiteTag

RiteTag is a paid hashtag analysis tool. Although, the free features can give you access to various insights that can boost your hashtag strategy. By using keywords, you can find numerous hashtags related to your industry or topics based on their popularity. 

TrackMyHashtag

TrackMyHashtag is an AI-driven Twitter hashtag analytics tool. It can track, monitor, and analyze the performance statistics of any hashtag. It can also give you access to the most popular hashtag according to your industry or content topic. It can also help you monitor the performance of your hashtags in real-time and track all tweets mentioning the hashtag. 

Closing thoughts

By using a data-driven hashtag strategy, you can increase engagement and maximize your social media success. Hashtag analysis lets you make informed decisions and helps develop an effective strategy to grow your brand. You can measure your brand awareness, spot influencers, identify engaging topics, find new customers, and monitor your campaigns in real-time.

Start using hashtag analysis to propel your brand to new heights.

Guest author: Shivam Singh is a passionate and enthusiastic content writer. He enjoys writing content about social media and marketing in general. He is passionate about providing valuable information for the readers. For his hobbies, he either spends his time listening to music or polishing his skills in landscape photography. Connect with him on Twitter or LinkedIn.