Hashtag Research Tools for Social Sellers

In this blog I will share the results of my search for new hashtag research tools to replace Topsy, my favorite go-to that Apple acquired and recently shut down. But before I start, let’s recap why social sellers should use hashtags:

  1. Let’s your targeted audience find your tweets
  2. Ties together the conversations of different users into one stream that can be searched to foster a conversation around a topic of interest
  3. Reinforces areas of your expertise or focus

I see a lot of auto-retweet feeds that don’t have hashtags, and quite simply, that’s a waste of time. Not only will people not find you and follow you, that’s not a way to start conversations, which is what this is all about.

Hashtag Best Practices

  1. Use 1 – 3 hashtags at the end of your tweets
  2. Do some research to find tags are popular with your audience (that’s where tools in addition to Twitter search are useful)
  3. Focus in on industry or brand keywords
  4. Build and use a list of related keywords so you can mix it up in your tweets
  5. Avoid hijacking trending hashtags on emotional topics (I was personally appalled to see people hijacking the wildfire news streams last summer to promote all sorts of stuff)

In my research, two tools rose to the top of the hashtag research tools list, Hashtagify.me and Ritetag. A reminder note: I am looking for a simple to use, free or cheap tool for B2B social sales rather than high volume B2C social media marketing.  There are wonderful tools out there with a lot of bells and whistles for social media marketers.  Our focus is for B2B enterprise and inside sales reps to help them with their social selling.

The Most Useful Hashtag Rearch Tools

Hashtagify.me – free hashtag search. Cool feature shows related hashtags with correlation scores, trending, recent top media, popularity score.

Ritetag –  free trial with affordable monthly pricing options. Core offering rates your tweets in realtime; under the Research tab, has a useful hashtag research tool with stats on tweets, retweets, exposure, and a nice related tags cloud.

Twubs – free version gives you a feed, contributors, ability to follow conversations (though you can do that with lists) a twitter chat schedule which wasn’t something we were seeking but quite useful by itself.

Tagboard  – free hashtag research tool for usage; presents a board of posts from multiple social media platforms, number of posts/ day, trend, and sentiment

Hashtracking  – follow and track specific tags (some free, some paid options)

Tweetbinder  – no free versions, starts at $45/ mo. which is fairly pricey for tracking of just one hashtag per month in realtime.

Trendsmap  – Trendsmap is a navigational tool that allows you to look up the trending hashtags by location

Hashtags.org – some limited free tools including definition, hourly trending, popular users, recent tweets. Have to upgrade to see related hashtags. Useful if you just want to know what are the trending or most popular hashtags.

Hashatit  – gives you all the recent posts across multiple social media platforms with the hashtag you entered.  The useful feature is the ability to pull of that into your own site.

The Losers

Hashtag Scout – hmmm not sure this one is working all that well….

Easy Hashtag – I tried to sign up for free and it kicked me out and then when I tried to sign up for a paid version it just took me to the generic contact form.  No company info anywhere on the site, no privacy policy.

Twitalyzer – shut down as of September 2013

 

Resources for this Post

https://blog.bufferapp.com/a-scientific-guide-to-hashtags-which-ones-work-when-and-how-many

http://sproutsocial.com/insights/twitter-hashtags/