Hashtags in Social Media – Free Tools

There is no doubt that getting eyeballs on your social posts is getting tougher these days with new Facebook rules, and the push for “pay for views” by the social networks.  In this podcast “Digitial Dave” lays out the use of the hashtag in social posting and some free tools to find highly correlating, highly popular hashtags to add to your social posts.

Episode Transcript

What is the hashtag? How do you use the hashtag? What are some of the ways that you can increase traffic to your social posts using hashtags? The hashtag is simply the pound symbol and a word of some type. That word can be … a concatenated word, more than one word; say #bestoftheday. Or, it could just be just one word, period, something like ‘#like.’ That’s basically what a hashtag is, a pound followed by a word or a concatenated word.

In social media, this hashtag originated really I guess with Twitter. Twitter was the first social network where you would add hashtags at the end of your post. The reason for the hashtags was it made it easier to search, kind of like by category almost; or by a popular phrase. Now, the hashtag is kind of evolved and is used throughout most of the social networks now, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram. They all have their version of hashtags.

Today, what we’re going to look at is a couple free tools that when you are adding hashtags to your social post, that you can increase the probability of getting more traffic from those social posts. Now, the first one we’re going to look at is a very simple free tool. It’s called TagsForLikes.com. That’s tags, T-A-G-S, F-O-R, likes, L-I-K-E-S, dot com. Once you visit that site, you’ll see you land on a page where they have a listing of some most popular hashtags. These would be hashtags that are popular as of this moment that you can easily embed in your posts.

Or, you can look at it, you can search for tags, and/or you can look by category. For instance, we might want to look in the foods category if we’re posting something on food. We can find some of the most popular tags for different types of foods. They have general, a general section, a dessert, drinks, coffee, tea. You can find tags within those. Tags within dessert would be pound food, or pound yum, or pound yummy. Those are tags that would be popular for food. If you wanted to look in another industry, say like travel or sports, you could expand that one. Let’s just say we were doing skateboarding. You could look for a tag there. You might find #skating is also a relevant … #skateboarding, is relevant for skateboarding as well. That’s TagsForLikes.com. Very simple site, just a quick easy way to go find some tags if you’re having a mind block; that will help increase, potentially your social traffic from the posts you’re making.

Now, a site that I particularly really like and it is also free and is called Hashtagify.me. That’s Hashtagify.me, H-A-S-H-T-A-G-I-F-Y dot M-E. This site is somewhat like the other site, although you can get instead of just groups of keywords, you can get specific related keywords to a keyword that you add in. You can get some really kind of cool data about that hashtag that you can use on your social marketing. For instance, I’ve typed in the tag, ‘baseball.’ That would be #baseball. What I find first off is some related tags here. The way this works is that you can hover over the different related tags to my tag that I’ve added, which is baseball. I can find other ones that … we can look at the popularity of those, or we can look at its relationship or correlation to the keyword that we’re actually putting in, which is ‘#baseball.’

I’m looking here around and what I find is that if you keep looking and hovering over, a lot of them are popular but they’re not so much related; except for this one, MLB. MLB, which stands for Major League Baseball, #MLB, is 76.7% popularity and a 40.9 correlation to baseball. This is the closest one really that I can find as far as a correlation to baseball. Now, what’s kind of cool here is that they have different modes you can look at, at these related hashtags. I’m in the basic mode. I’m going to switch it to advanced, and switching it to advanced in and of itself doesn’t do anything; until you double-click on one of the related hashtags.

I’m going to double-click on MLB and you’ll see I get this interesting chart of … Oops, I didn’t mean to do that. Let’s do that again. I actually switched the keyword here. Let’s go back to basic mode, we’ll do this again. We’re going to come up here, we’re going to put in ‘baseball.’ We’re going to hit enter, and it’s going to reorganize them. I’m going to get my tags. I’m going to switch to advanced. Okay. Oh, it’s not letting me switch here. Interesting. Oh, there we go. Just took a little bit of time. I’m going to double-click on MLB … and I’m going to get … keep sending MLB to the middle, which I’m not trying to do but it keeps doing it.

I’m going to actually try this one more time. We’re going to double-click on baseball. You just click on it once is what you do. Let’s put baseball back in the middle and what we’ll get is these are the related keywords to baseball that we looked at. Then, you get MLB, and then these are the related keywords to MLB. It kind of gives you a view of both of those, and which ones overlap for both of them. MLB overlaps Red Sox, MLB overlaps tops, baseball overlaps both of those. That’s a great way to get some information relating to the keywords, related keywords (hastags) to a hashtag.

Now in addition to that, what I can do is if my hashtag is baseball and I want to go find the top influencers that are on Twitter. This is Twitter information. I click on the top influencers tab, and it actually gives me the top five. Now, you can get more, but you have to sign up for your pro version, which isn’t free. This is in the free version. I can see that MLB is the number one Twitter ranked social site with … or social site with seven million, WillyLevy29, JoeyBats19, KingsThings, DaddyYankee, and Joseph1959 are the top six. It gives me how many followers each one of these particular influencers has. That’s kind of nice information if you wanted to go out and follow these people because they’re going to be the most social people on the Twitter network.

In addition to that, you can get usage patterns; which I kind of find interesting. If you click on the usage patterns tag, it will give you like the trend line. This would be similar to Google trends for keywords. This is the trendline for hashtags for baseball. You can see this is pretty stable and has a pretty high degree of popularity, 58, 60% over time. Then, they give you some additional information below that as to what times of days, and days of the weeks that these things are the most popular; as well as languages and spelling variants of the hashtag baseball that you might want to consider using. Great information about each individual hashtag.

Then they have a wall, which then the wall is interesting because it gives you all of … the posts that are out there at this moment that are using that hashtag. Here’s the hashtag baseball. You can see that this is being used a good bit. Here’s some of the … posts that have been posted with the hashtag baseball. You can continue to load more if you want to see what’s kind of relevant or being posted out there at this moment. This is Hashtagify.me. The other site we were talking about is TagsForLikes. These are both great sites, as I said, to find hashtags that are related and popular to use within your social posts. They increase your social posts response rates. We hope this is helpful. Join us on our next episode of ‘Where Marketing Meets Technology.’ This is Digital Dave and we will see you next time.