The Best Free Tools to Choose and Measure Your Hashtag

One of the questions we get all the time at ReThink Media is how to select which hashtag to use in a tweet or campaign. While there is no one perfect tool, here are a few free tools that can help you choose the best hashtag and measure its success going forward.

To the detriment of the Internet, Topsy, our former go-to resource for all things hashtags, announced its closure and searched its last tweet. While Topsy was a great resource for social media managers, it is not irreplaceable. We’ll walk you through a few replacements we have been using.

Topsy has previously been a social media manager’s go-to for Twitter data. The platform was able to analyze all of Twitter’s raw data to deliver information on trending hashtags, how many tweets have used a hashtag and so on. Apple first purchased Topsy in December of 2013, but until recently had continued to function as a Twitter analytics platform. Alas, no longer. 

Going out in a blaze of glory, Topsy changed its Twitter bio to read: “Every tweet ever published. Previously at your fingertips.”

Despite this loss, below are 3 alternatives you can use to measure and select the top hashtags:

Topsy Alternatives

1) Hashtags.org:

Using Hashtags.org, you are able to look at hashtags, one at a time, over a 24-hour period.

You can use this tool to see how popular a hashtag is, which is useful when trying to determine whether a conversation is popular enough to jump into or whether a hashtag is available to use for an upcoming campaign. 

2) Hashtagify.me:

Sign up (for free) at hashtagify.me to compare hashtags over a 2-month period. 

This lets you measure two competing hashtags and select the one that is most popular. It also helps you compare share of voice of two competing conversations, which is useful when tracking opposition.

3) RiteTag

On RiteTag.com, you will be able to set up notifications telling you which hashtags are trending, which to use, associated hashtags and more. This free tool gives you more intelligence than the other free platforms mentioned above. And another great way to use it: just tweet @RiteTagAPI with the hashtag you want to measure, say the word “stats,” and the API will tweet that hashtag’s statistics back to you.

ReThink Media also uses Sysomos (a paid, high-end measurement tool), which provides information on hashtags, trends, and conversations happening on multiple social platforms, including Twitter. We are able to compare shares of voice in conversations, as well as identify the top-retweeted messages and influencers in a given conversation. Let us know if there is a hashtag you would really like to see us dig into.

What are your favorite hashtag tools? Tweet us @rethink_media and let us know!

Sidenote:

If you ever want a gut check of which hashtag to use, feel free to reach out to ReThink Media’s staff, or Dorry Levine, ReThink’s Digital Media Strategist. We’re always happy to help.

Sarah Needle is the former digital media intern at ReThink Media.