Free Hashtag Tracking Tools in 2022: From the Experts

Free Hashtag Tracking Tools: If you are an avid social media user and have been the same in the past few years, you must have surely noticed the trend of hashtags on almost every social media platform.

Hashtags, ever since their inception on social media, have been used frequently on various social media platforms in the past couple of years.

Instagram being one of the most popular platforms where there is a prevalence of hashtags, a study revealed that 23.1 percent of Instagram posts consisted of 4 to 10 hashtags. 

The Beginning of Hashtags

Hashtags started off as a symbol that was used to search for posts on Twitter. It was introduced on the platform by Chris Messina on August 23, 2007.

Before this, the hashtag symbol had a wide variety of applications in the world of the web. Ever since its usage on Twitter, it has been used in a variety of ways across social media platforms and has now become a cross-platform and multi-purpose symbol.

Hashtags are used by businesses, professionals, influencers, individual social media users alike. They are pretty much used for almost everything. 

From major global events like the #Olympics to solidarity on movements like #MeToo, hashtags have become a powerful tool of communication in the modern social media scenario.

Hashtags have become an integral part of almost every social media post and a key element to the success of any social media marketing or promotional campaign.

The symbol is being used in versatile ways and often becomes the identity and recognition factor of a certain campaign, brand, or professional. In today’s time, hashtags are something that simply cannot be ignored when it comes to running a successful social media marketing campaign. 

Hashtag Tracking: Why Is it Important?

One of the most popular platforms where hashtags are used is Instagram. Along with Twitter, which is the origin of the trend of hashtags, Instagram is the most popular platform where almost every post comes with a hashtag.

Not just Instagram, but lots of social media platforms including Facebook, Snapchat, Pinterest, Reddit as well as YouTube sees a lot of hashtag usage. 

The most common kinds of content used for social media promotion and marketing are photos and videos. A survey in February 2019 showed that Instagram was the most used platform for viewing photos and it tied with Snapchat in terms of being the preferred social network for viewing videos. 

In today’s time, there has been an overflow of information and data across the world. In this scenario, creating and operating a social media marketing campaign has become more complicated and difficult.

• Consistent monitoring and evaluation of the needs and transforming preferences of the audience are essential to gain useful insights and optimize the campaign strategies and efforts accordingly. This is where hashtags and appropriate hashtag tracking can be of great use. 
• Appropriate hashtags can help capture the imagination of the online audience and help businesses and individuals streamline their campaigns to increase their social media presence.
• A hashtag can be used to create campaigns and promotions that are in sync with the trends, emotions of the users on the platform and can be optimized to resonate with the choices, preferences, and imaginations of the target audience. 
• Hashtags offer great opportunities to brands and individuals on social media platforms to create brand awareness, as well as interact and connect with the target audience. They make social media channels and websites of businesses more visible and easy to discover. The use of hashtags has significantly increased on social media over the past few years. 

• Hashtags, when used appropriately, can help enhance the reach and engagement of your posts. Statistics suggest that posts with a minimum of one hashtag have 12.6% more engagement than posts that do not have any hashtags. This is why, many brands, influencers as well as marketing professionals create custom hashtags for their campaigns.
• It makes it easier to group relevant posts and conversations under a single tag. Hashtags are especially important on platforms like Instagram and Twitter. 

Read More: 9 Twitter Hashtag Research Tools for Marketers

• Using hashtags effectively and appropriately for your brand and your campaign is not as simple as it appears. It can be really challenging and complicated considering the high frequency and high usage of the terms in various languages, different locations as well as in different contexts.

This is where hashtag tracking tools and hashtag analytics come into play. Using random hashtags is more counter-productive than being useful to get the desired results for a certain campaign. 

Hashtags must be in accordance with the campaign goals and the preferences of your target audience. Finding semantically related hashtag ideas is not simply a job of copy-paste.

This is where a hashtag generator and hashtag tracking tool can be useful. They can offer the right solutions for effective and professional hashtag tracking.

In the next part, we have listed the best free hashtag tracking tools in 2021. The list is compiled after extensive market research and on the basis of expert opinions and recommendations. The list consists of the best hashtag tracking tools that are free of cost and can be the perfect tools to use in 2021.

They can help deliver the ideal results for your marketing campaign and enhance your brand reach, visibility, and engagement when used appropriately. So let us now take a look at this list from the experts of social media marketing and hashtag analysis. 

Free Hashtag Tracking Tools

When it comes to improving the online visibility and engagement of your brand and ensuring the success of your marketing campaigns, these top-rated and expert-recommended hashtag tracking tools can be really handy.

Proper hashtag tracking with the help of these tools can make your campaign efforts easier and more effective while also enabling you to assess your performance accurately and gain useful insights about user trends, popular and relevant hashtags. 

Let us take a look at the best free hashtag tracking tools that you must know about.

RiteTag

RiteTag is a part of RiteKit, which is one of the most popular platforms used for tracking the performance of a hashtag. The tool enables its users to search for and find the most trending hashtags and effectively use the suggestions to enhance engagement.

RiteTag helps you to find the hashtags that can offer the highest exposure and reach for your content. It also offers insight into hashtags that are losing popularity and the visibility history of a hashtag.

Some key features of RiteTag are:

• Trending hashtag alerts.
• Hashtag grouping into tag sets. 
• Real-time hashtag analytics.
• Browser extension helps analyze hashtag potentials. 

Mentionlytics

Another very popular social media analytics tool, as well as a very useful hashtag tracking tool, is used by a lot of businesses and brands. Mentionlytics helps keep track of the brand or product mentions across various social networking platforms.

From multinational companies to startups as well as solo influencers, this tool is handy for anyone who intends to streamline their efforts on online reputation management, hashtags tracking, and effective lead generation. 

The tool also enables effective competitor analytics, finding digital marketing influencers, and a lot more.

The tool is preferred for its detailed analytical data and statistical reports along with a variety of other features presented to you on a fairly easy-to-use interface. 

Some key features of Mentionlytics are: 

• Social Intelligence Advisor: An AI-powered feature that runs an algorithm to prepare useful reports on statistics like brand mentions. 
• The AI feature also offers deep insights along with the reports. 
• Easy and quick platform 

Keyhole

Keyhole is a very useful and effective social media analytics tool that can yield some really impressive results for your social media marketing campaigns.

The hashtag tracking tool offers a real-time monitoring feature for hashtags on Instagram and Twitter. It also provides in-depth reports on the impressions, reaches, and the number of posts and users of a particular hashtag. 

The tool is really handy when formulating hashtag strategies. You can also get a complete timeline for hashtag performance and find out when it started getting impressions.

Some key features of Keyhole are: 

• Enables account-level analytics and optimization features
• Makes it easier to find high-performing hashtags
• Suggests optimization strategies for better engagement of your posts.
• Tag cloud with related hashtags 

Hashtagify

Hashtagify is a freemium hashtag tracking tool that comes with almost every feature you will be looking for in such a tool. From information like hashtag popularity, and related hashtags to impressions, engagements, mentions, and a lot more, the platform offers it all. 

The tool offers a complete history of hashtag usage as well as offers a predictive analysis of how a particular hashtag will be used in the future.

Some key features of Hashtagify are: 

• ‘Advanced’ mode for deeper insights into the related hashtags
• ‘Table’ mode to know about hashtag trends.

TweetReach

TweetReach is a perfect analytical tool for modern-day social media marketers. The tool is also a very powerful hashtag tracking software and is very effective for hashtag research. 

TweetReach comes with features like real-time hashtag monitoring for Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. With the help of this tool, you can also find out when a particular hashtag was used as well as who used them and where they were used.

Some key features of TweetReach are: 

• The free snapshot analytics for hashtag popularity, people who used the hashtags, and a lot more. 
• Real-time tracking of hashtags

Tagboard

Tagboard is an innovative hashtag tracking tool that prepares visual boards of reports containing the details of hashtag performance. The hashtag reports are obtained from different social media platforms.

It offers an in-depth analysis along with showing relevant and related hashtags that can be useful to enhance the reach and engagement for a brand.

Once you enter your hashtag or keyword to run a search, a dashboard will get updated from multiple social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. You can choose to remove reports from the networking site you are not active on.

Some key features of Tagboard are: 

• Simple and easy to use interface
• Tagboard allows the identification of mentions and conversations that are relevant or related to you. 
• Enables actions like a retweet, likes, comments, replies, and shares from the analysis report itself.

Twubs

Twubs is a different kind of hashtag tracking tool where you can initiate a conversation in regards to a specific hashtag. The tool offers a hashtag directory where you can find specific hashtag feeds.

The tool enables marketers to discover popular hashtags relevant to a brand or a product and use them to enhance visibility, reach, and online presence.

Some key features of Twubs are: 

• Hashtag chatroom where you can interact with others. 
• You can create a hashtag chat room yourself on a particular hashtag and then link the feed to your blog or website.

TweetBinder

This tool is a great option for relatively new marketers working on social media platforms. The platform can help you get the best results for your campaign without any complicated analytics and reports. It offers a complete overview of hashtag performance in the form of simple and easy to comprehend reports.

Tweetbinder does not only show how a certain hashtag is performing, but also offers details about its engagement.

Some key features of TweetBinder are: 

• An overall analysis of tweets related to a particular hashtag
• Complete details of tweets by their types, retweets, replies, etc.

So now you have the list of the best hashtag tracking tools in 2021 from the experts in the field. Although some of these tools are not completely free, the free versions of these tools can be useful and enough to serve your purposes to hashtag tracking. 

Factors to Keep in Mind When Using Hashtag Tracking Tools

Although you have a list of the best and most effective tools for hashtag tracking in this year, there are a few things to keep in mind before you start using any of them.

Be Clear About Your Needs

For making the best use of the potential of hashtags and hashtag analysis, you need to be clear about your campaign requirements. Be sure to know if you need a  general hashtag or a specialized branded hashtag for a certain campaign along with its timeline.

Test the Tools

Before you start using any of the hashtag tracking tools for your next social media marketing campaign, make sure to test how they work and if they can serve your needs and purposes. It will also help you get acquainted with the platform and make better use of it within a shorter time span. 

An Organized Database of Hashtag Reports

You must create an organized database of hashtag reports. This will be really convenient for you and will make things simpler and seamless for you. It will ensure greater accessibility to the data as well. 

Final Thoughts

All that being said, we hope this mini-guide on hashtags and the list of best hashtag tracking tools in 2021 can help you get the desired results for your social media marketing campaigns.

Hashtags are extensively used and are an integral part of modern-day social media marketing strategies. But they cannot be randomly used.

This is why the list of hashtag tracking and analytics tools provided above can help you make the appropriate use of hashtags for the maximum success of your campaign!

We hope this information will help you make the right choice when selecting hashtag tracking tools for your social media marketing campaign and enhance the reach and visibility of your campaign, fetching the best results for your efforts.