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Twitter Marketing Strategies
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What do you do if you want to grow search engine ranking? The answer is clear – you spend time researching and finding the best keywords. But what do you do if you want to raise social media awareness? Once again, the answer is obvious – you must try and identify the most relevant hashtags.
Every social media platform is now addicted to hashtags, but it all started with Twitter. The first hashtag in the history of social media was posted by Chris Messina back in 2007 when he published a well-known tweet: “How do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?”
From that point on, hashtags have become the fundamental component of Twitter marketing and the easiest way to categorize and search for users and/or content. They have gradually evolved over the years, so now it’s more important than ever to create a perfect hashtag strategy.
It’s not a simple task as many marketers never really learn how to track their hashtags on Twitter. If you are still struggling with it or trying to improve your hashtag strategy, keep reading this article to see everything there is to know about hashtag tracking.
Twitter Hashtag Facts and Types
The first thing we want to clarify here is the sheer significance of your hashtag strategy on Twitter. Social media reports give us a great insight into Twitter marketing, so let’s check out the key stats:
- Tweets with hashtags get 100% more engagement, which practically means that your posts must contain hashtags if you want to grow popularity.
- Users post nearly six thousand tweets every second, so the only way to stand out is to use the right hashtags.
- Twitter has over 336 million active monthly users, but tweets reach 6 billion people via third-party platforms. In other words, a well-planned hashtag strategy can drastically increase your twitter marketing efficiency.
The result of your hashtag plan depends on two things – the type of hashtag you are using and the metrics you are following. Here are the main hashtag types:
- Content hashtags that are directly related to the topic you’re discussing.
- Event hashtags enable you to participate in event-related discussions or simply to promote the forthcoming company gathering.
- Branded hashtags are unique Twitter keywords that users can mention and remember you by such as #collegepapers for the college papers
- Campaign hashtags serve a highly specific purpose and help you run a given campaign.
- Trending hashtags are a good choice if you want to take advantage of the hottest topics.
Key Hashtag Metrics to Monitor
One thing you need to remember is that tweets with too many hashtags tend to underperform. Here’s what Twitter says about that: “We recommend using no more than two hashtags per tweet as best practice, but you may use as many hashtags in a tweet as you like.”
Jake Gardner, a digital marketer and essay writer at Research paper writing service, claims that the vast majority of marketers agree that posts with up to two or three hashtags have the biggest effect on the target audience: “Anything more than that is considered to be spammy and intrusive.”
Hashtag selection is obviously a critical decision-making moment because you have to choose between thousands of hashtags and find a couple with the greatest market potential. In such circumstances, it is necessary to consider crucial hashtag tracking metrics:
- Popularity: This is, of course, one of the most important parameters as you do want to approach as many users as possible. The only mistake would be to choose popular hashtags without paying attention to the relevance of your selection.
- Reach: The actual number of Twitter users who see your post is even more important. The higher the reach, the higher the odds of achieving your business objectives.
- Interaction: The way people react to the hashtag is also fundamental as you probably hope for real Twitter followers to interact with the content through likes, retweets, and shares.
- Users: What are the traits of the person using a given hashtag? Does it suit your typical customer or interferes with the characteristics of your buyer persona? Think about it before picking a hashtag.
Best Tools to Track Twitter Hashtags
Now that you understand the parameters relevant to hashtag selection, there is another big decision to be made. You can always try and analyze hashtags manually, but we guess you don’t have the time nor patience to do it like that.
The only reasonable solution is to use a professional hashtag tracking tool and automate the work. But there are hundreds of more or less efficient marketing platforms available online, so it’s good to cut down the list to several tools only. Here are our favorite Twitter hashtag monitoring tools:
Twitter Advanced Search
Is there a better place to start tracking hashtags than Twitter itself? Using a native tool like Advanced Search, you can check almost everything there is to know about any given hashtag, user, post, and so on. You are free to set timing preferences and test hashtag performance within a certain timeframe. The only detail we don’t like about Twitter Advanced Search is that you need to do most of these actions manually, which is a serious disadvantage if you are a dedicated data analyst.
Brand24
Although it’s not focused on Twitter exclusively, Brand24 is a serious Twitter monitoring platform with all the features you need to pinpoint and track the best hashtags. Apart from hashtag tracking, it also offers you the following functions:
- Hashtag analytics. You can estimate the reach of every hashtag on Twitter and get a clear overview of results through the user-friendly dashboard.
- Campaign monitoring. Based on a predefined set of hashtags, it’s easy to keep an eye on your contests, ads, and other types of campaigns.
- Data analysis and reporting. Brand24 generates great reports with visualized insights and simple explanations.
Brand Mentions
Brand Mentions is a reliable hashtag analytics tool with a broad scope of additional functions. We love it because of the supporting features such as:
- Brand monitoring. You can receive the latest brand-related insights straight to your inbox.
- Competitor spying. It’s always a good idea to keep track of competitors hashtags and learn how they adjust Twitter strategies in real-time.
- Reputation management. If there are any comments or remarks related to your business, Brand Mentions will keep you informed instantly.
Up to You!
Hashtags may seem like a minor social media element, but they perform a major function. If you are looking to attract more followers and raise brand awareness, you need to learn how to track hashtags on Twitter. We showed you how to do it in a few practical steps and using some of the best monitoring platforms, but now you need to put these ideas into practice and maximize the effect of your Twitter marketing strategy. Good luck!
