How to Measure Hashtag Performance

06 December 2023

Hashtags have become part of our technological culture in the still-advancing 21st century. Their use is so widespread that even the traditional media have embraced them.

Although most of us indeed identify a word preceded by the pound symbol as a hashtag and know, more or less, about what it’s used for, we’re not always fully aware of its maximum potential. So today, Metricool wants to talk you through what a hashtag is and the importance of applying a good strategy to measure it.

What is a Hashtag?

What does a hashtag mean? A hashtag is a label that identifies an idea, a concept, a brand, or a fact. In a few words, a categorization system. A hashtag is a vehicle used by social media to compile everything that is said about a specific topic on the network. 

At the same time, it’s an excellent tool to help you connect and meet other users that you wouldn’t know otherwise. You learn about what they share, like, complain about, etc. So not only does the interconnected universe know your content, hashtags allow you to meet and understand your audience.

Why Track a Hashtag’s Performance?

Measuring a hashtag lets you make an active follow-up of your potential clients/users. It will be part of the basic investigation to develop a successful marketing strategy.

Which indicators do you need to measure the importance of a hashtag? As it happens with many aspects of marketing in the new media, the answer is not static. You must adapt the different variables to the various cases. However, these variables remain more of less the same: reach, usage, generated conversations, origin, active users, and how influential they are.

That being said, the monitoring hashtags goes beyond our own small world. Think about it, you could know who says what and what is said about your competitors, identify and fill market niches… Doesn’t that sound great?

Knowing how to use hashtags is one of the pillars for your brand’s success on social media and its measurement is fundamental. This will become more clear when you face the challenge of organizing an event.

Events Hashtags

An event hashtag is a hashtag created for a specific event where people can search to get information before the event, where people can use the hashtag to post content of the event, and for people to view all the content in one place after the event. Why are we saying this? Event hashtags bring together the following: information gathering + event dissemination + sponsor acquisition for new events

Gathering: Bring together all attendees (present or virtual) in one concept that identifies you. And it will be these players who bring that concept to light! Essentially, free promotion that contributes to the proliferation of your brand or event.

Dissemination: Make your brand or company be heard in social networks and become a reference (or model) for the followers of your hashtag. This enables the possibility of becoming a trending topic at a specific time, which will depend on the number of hashtags on the day of the event, the number of attendees, and the influencers who speak about it.

Sponsors: Having real data about the your event helps to attract sponsors for future events. What does a sponsor want? Your brand to spread, reach as many people as possible, and making noise in social media.

Improve using the measurements of your events through a hashtag. There is no result without measurement.

The Perfect Hashtag for My Event

Does the perfect hashtag exist? Yes, but you need to know this key information to find the ideal one.

✅ Memorable: It must be easily remembered to increase its effectiveness. It should summarize the event and identify it clearly. A very long hashtag will take too much space and it will be difficult to memorize.

✅ Unique: It might sound obvious but it’s not. Metricool has found on several occasions, different events with the same hashtag. Make sure your hashtag hasn’t been used and if it was in the past, be sure it’s no longer in use.

✅ Short and simple: It must be to the point in order to be effective.

✅ Multichannel: Follow the hashtag in all social networks. Even the ones that weren’t in your scope in the first place. At the end of the day, the audience marks the path and you must adapt to their needs, their channels, and their message tone.

✅ Hashtag dissemination: Another key aspect is where to use your hashtag. The answer is simple: everywhere: e-mail, the event’s site, all landing pages, ads (including the animated ones), invitations, and merchandising. In other words, everything related to the event.

Involving all participants, sponsors and attendees is key to the success of the event.

How to Measure Hashtags with Metricool

Metricool can measure a hashtag on Twitter and monitor its results. It is a very easy-to-use option that will save you time as it gives you a hashtag report, putting all metrics in the same place in a very intuitive and complete report.

Hashtag Tracker tool

In your Metricool profile, both free and premium versions, you can find the Real-Time option. Once you access it, on the menu on the left you will find the hashtag tracker (#Tracker) that is for hashtag monitoring on Twitter and Instagram.

For $9.99 you can monitor a hashtag for a 24-hour period. Once you have made your purchase, you’ll be able to configure the tracker options.

Add the Hashtag on Twitter or Instagram that you want to Measure

In the #hashtag box, insert the hashtag of your company, event, or promotion. You can also add the logo of your brand so you will have your corporate image in the final report.

Date, Time, and Scheduling

You can measure past events retrospectively up to 7 days and schedule a measurement for a future date. You must include both the start time and date to launch the analysis.

Which data you will obtain

Metricool will cover all the relevant data providing a complete hashtag report with a visually pleasing and professional-looking design including graphics, images, and stats. Some of the metrics include posts, participants, pictures, and impressions.

Real-time displays

In them, they updated real-time data on the situation of your hashtag, most active users, comments, images, etc. These screens can be accompanied by the design of your brand and you can share them to encourage your users to participate and generate branding. Real-time displays can be projected during events at times when the screen is not used or there is a break. The five screens that Metricool offers you are:

  • Summary: All data appears in abbreviated form.
  • Ranking of the most active participants in the hashtag.
  • Ranking of participants with more potential impressions.
  • The last published tweets contained the hashtag.
  • Latest published images on Twitter.

Dashboard

This is where all the results are displayed including:

Activity graph: In this first section you will see the activity that has been on Twitter with your hashtag and you can configure it to analyze it by hour or minute.

Language distribution: Here you can see how many tweets have been published in each language.

Device source distribution: Where you can analyze from which device has been tweeting, specifying how many tweets have been published from computers, smartphones with Android operating system, etc.

Participating countries: In a graph, you will see the countries from which you have tweeted, and within each one, the cities appear in order of activity.

Countries and cities where your hashtag is a Trending Topic.

Ranking of participants: You can order the ranking of participants according to their followers, tweets, images, impressions, interactions, likes, retweets, and mentions. Next to the participants, you have the opportunity to download in Excel format all the users who have participated in the event through the hashtag and you can later use it for Twitter audiences.

Ranking of tweets: Here you will find a ranking of 100 tweets that you can order by several categories: date, impressions, followers, I like, retweets, interactions, and engagement.

Word Search: Search for any word to see how many tweets have appeared. You can analyze if you have spoken more about one topic or another just by searching for a keyword.

Hashtags cloud: You will find the different hashtags along with the ones that the audience has tweeted the hashtag you are analyzing.

Ranking of images: At the end of the whole report on the analysis of your tweets you can find a ranking with 100 photos.

Reports in PDF

At the top of the page, you have the option to generate a PDF report with all the important metrics so you can share it with collaborators, clients, or participants. Measuring a hashtag will no longer be complicated and you will save time when assembling a report with results.

Measuring a hashtag won’t be a headache any longer and you’ll save time creating a report.

▶️ You can register with Metricool here and check out this tool and more ◀️

Saved Hashtags

In Metricool, you can also save your hashtags so you can always refer back to them. You can see when it was created, the duration, and most importantly the analytics were also saved as well so you can see how it performed.

Analyze your Instagram hashtags with Metricool

In the Evolution section, you can analyze all the hashtags used on your Instagram account.

A table will be displayed with the following information and it can be organized in descending order or vice versa:

  • The hashtags and images where you used these hashtags.
  • Impressions on posts.
  • The number of posts that included each hashtag.
  • Number of likes on posts with a specific hashtag.
  • Total of comments on photos.

With this data, you will know which hashtags you used more often and the most successful ones.

Besides, you will get all the info about the most popular hashtags amongst your competitors along with their metrics, so you can understand their strategies and redirect yours accordingly.

Do’s and Don’ts of Hashtags

We’re used to seeing millions of hashtags daily and we can follow them throughout the complex social media environment. This is part of our work and we love it since we have the opportunity to understand the best way to use hashtags and identify the most common mistakes:

Actions to Promote Your Strategy

✅ Rules for niche hashtags: The best way to concentrate a very dispersed community but with very clear common interests, is to summarize a strategy in one or two hashtags, either coming from the brand (ad campaign) or from that specific community. So, we come full circle and remind you of the importance of measuring hashtags and selecting an appealing one.

✅ Each social network has its peculiarities: Yes, all social networks use hashtags, but their use and behavior are different. This difference comes from the nature of each channel. Twitter is not the same as Instagram or Facebook, …  well Facebook takes its own path. Learn from what they tell you. All of them offer some guidelines and graphics. Use them!

✅ The most successful hashtags for a brand transmit a value or an idea: if you want to understand why some #labels are viral and others are barely noticed, monitor a hashtag and you will see that the successful ones focus on emotions and the less successful ones are too rational and caught up in their own singular world.

✅ Use the correct amount of hashtags on each platform. There is a sweet spot in terms of the amount of hashtags to use per platform. You must pay attention to this portion because too little may not do anything and too many may come off spammy or even get you shadowbanned.

✅ Stay up-to-date on trending hashtags. Utilize the trending hashtags that make sense to your brand. We created a blog where we explore some trending hashtags to be aware of! We also offer a Hashtag Generator for both Instagram and TikTok, where you can type in a word and see all the trending hashtags having to do with that topic.

How not to use a Hashtag

❌ #thisisnotavalidhashtagtoberememberedbyanyone. Don’t you think? The same way as new companies are inclined to use short brand names, never ever, choose a lengthy label that users are unable to read. Give them something fresh.

❌ #only #use #hashtag #for #anyidea #evenmybrand #results #tiring. You don’t speak like this in real life so why do it on social media? Search, measure, and create unique hashtags that users love to share.

At Metricool, we are confessed fans of hashtags. They are an essential part of making a general and thorough analysis of your content and they help you build your brand. It’s the only way you can guarantee the complete success of your digital marketing strategy.

⚡️ If you use a striking hashtag you will increase your audience but only if you share content that is worth reading.

Do you still have doubts and think we can help? We are always open to new projects that bring new challenges to keep us learning. If that’s your case, let us know!

Laura Montells Laura Montells , 06 December 2023

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