Ever since Twitter launched over a decade ago, hashtags have been a useful means of categorizing and filtering social media content. In marketing terms, they can be an effective way of making your content more discoverable, but only if you have identified and are using the correct hashtags. There are three useful tools for identifying popular or trending hashtags across various social media platforms.
- RiteTag– RiteTag integrates with Twitter and Facebook and identifies trending and popular hashtags based on real-time hashtag engagement, and allows you to get instant hashtag suggestions and automatically add these tags to your Facebook posts or Tweets. It’s extremely versatile, and as well as being available in the form of a Firefox extension, iOS or Android app, it can also integrate with a number of social media analytics and management tools including Hootsuite, HubSpot and Sprout Social.
- Iconosquare– Iconosquare is a social media management and analytics tool that integrates with Instagram and Facebook. You can use Iconosquare to find how popular particular hashtags are, as well as to see the top trending hashtags on the sites, which you may be able to piggyback on if you can organically connect your product or service to the trending phrase. Iconosquare is also a robust social media tool that helps users understand and improve performance on key social media
- me– Hashtagify.me allows you to search real-time data on any hashtags on Twitter or Instagram, and displays visually a selection of related hashtags to use in your Tweets or Instagram posts. This can be useful as it means you can use a range of related hashtags to improve discoverability, rather than always using the most popular tags. Hashtagify.me is also a powerful social media analytics tool that allows users to download charts and dashboards of tracked hashtags to evaluate how well your marketing campaign is performing.
These three tools, either individually or together, can provide excellent insights into trending social media hashtags, as well as offering other insights and analytics. Identifying and using the right hashtags can be a useful way for your social media posts to gain extra reach and greater opportunities for engagement.