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How track hashtag performance
How do you track hashtags to see which are worth using again? I’m not talking about using an individual hashtag in a post. I’m referring to when you’ve got multiple hashtags in an Instagram or twitter post for example?
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5 Replies
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Unfortunately, Instagram doesn’t want you to know exactly which hashtags to use or they would offer that kind of analysis already. I don’t know of any service that has the ability to measure individual hashtag performance. If I did, my IG account would keep me very busy, a problem I would love to have!!
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If you just want to check the use of a hashtag, I normally check ritetag.com – Ritetag tells you if that hashtag is working and if your post is likely to be seen. If there are too many people using that hashtag, e.g #COVID, not many people will see your posts (at least not through that hashtag) because too many other posts are out there.
If you want to track the performance of a hashtag over time, including ones you’ve used in previous posts, you can use Free Social Search by TalkWalker to get some basic analysis. You can use FSS for Twitter, but I’m not sure about Instagram. You can also use it for Reddit, news and forums.
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This is a tool I would like to integrate into our current hashtag generator. It would basically track your account and check the hashtag pages for every post of yours for any hashtag you’ve used.
It would then tell you at what position in the top posts your posts were ranking over time. Then it can highlight which hashtags ranked the highest and for a longer time.
Is this all you would like to know? What other features could be helpful?
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I like using IQHashtags.com – It will show you the tags you’ve used, how many times you’ve used it and how many posts exist in that tag. It also has a feature that will show you similar tags to your ideal tags and rank them. It has paid features but I’ve never needed them.
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Theoretically, a little statistical analysis could work if you were fairly rigorous about it but Instagram throws enough noise into the system that you would have a hard time.
Basically create a list of 50-60 hashtags. Randomly sample 1/2 of those hashtags and do the post. Then do another random sample and another post. Repeat for dozens of posts. After a while, you could do an analysis of the results and start to see the likelihood of a particular hashtag having an impact on your post.
But… And here’s a big problem: Instagram likes to just randomly turn accounts “on” and “off”. So you would need to have a larger sample size so you can throw out the posts where Instagram was being mean.
But also, the other nasty variable is that each post is different and is going to naturally have a different success rate even if you used the same hashtags on all of them.
So, can it be done? Maybe. Smarthash tries to do it, but I don’t think their results are all that great.
Personally, I built a list of 60 hashtags, did random split tests for a while, then I just went to my most successful posts and reused those groups of hashtags. It works ok.
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