Hashing Out Your Hashtags – #DigitalMarketing

If your gearing up for some Twitter campaigns or just wondering how to search, track and research hashtags, here are some tools and tips.

Trends on Twitter can offer some great insights for the client and marketer alike. Below are some tips and tools to find out the most popular trends, hashtags, and relevant topics at any given time. As you begin to run campaigns and conduct social listening, you will find these to be valuable.



History of Hashtags – Click to enlarge

Keep in mind that a hashtag is simply a way for people to label and search for social media updates. It may be a trending topic such as #throwbackthursday or a campaign-specific label such as a movement or campaign name, such as #Movember. These campaigns should incorporate keywords, phrases and terms your audience will understand. By looking at relevant terms you can see who may be drawn to your hashtag campaign.

Hashtags Campaign Tips


When developing your hashtag campaign:

  • Keep it relevant to the subject
  • Don’t use hashtags all the time in a campaign – focus on your category
  • Start your own unique hashtag, particularly for campaigns
  • Incorporate popular keywords with Google Keyword Planner to base your hashtags on
  • Make your content intriguing, entertaining or educational to encourage sharing
Tools for Campaigns and Social Listening


1. Hashtags.org

The Hashtags.org service was launched as a free service, but has evolved into a paid service. The main value with the free service is seeing what is trending over the past 24 hours. If you want to store and monitor hashtags over time you will need to use the paid service. There is some good info. Check it out.

2. What the Trend
WhatTheTrend is a huge resource for Twitter related stats and information. It’s main benefit is that it allows you to see global trends as well as country & even city data. It’s a great place for bloggers to look for inspiration for currently trending topics to cover. 


3. Hashtagify.me

Hashtagify is a tool for hashtag intelligence. You can monitor hashtag popularity and influence, find related tags, segment usage patterns and influencers. This tool can help you streamline a more effective marketing and promotional strategy.

One interesting correlation on this site is the ability to see how terms are related to one another.



4. #tagdef
Tagdef is a website that will come in very handy when conducting your hashtag research. As you may have already realized, most hashtags are either acronyms or condensed terms, which can make it difficult to understand what the term actually means. That’s where #tagdef comes in.

Tagdef is essentially a combined dictionary/thesaurus for trending hashtags. As an example, I looked up the popular hashtag “tbt”.

5. TrendsMap
Trendsmap is a great geo-targeting tool which visualizes the use of hashtags. Displayed on a world map, you can see whats tending by region. You can view currently trending hashtags by continent, country or city. Great for local business wanting to keep up with local trends. Very practical site.




This could be useful to advertisers who want to study the trends of different hashtags. If you see that a certain hashtag is only popular during certain months or seasons, you can plan out your social media strategy around those trends.



The Good

The Bad

The Ugly

“Keep Calm and #Hashtag On”


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