How to Leverage Hashtag Analytics to Sell More on Your Social Channels

Hashtags are the perfect strategy for any writer who uses social media to market their work. You can use them to find relevant content to share, to help your audience find your content easily, and to keep up with relevant conversations within your writing niche.

But how do you use a hashtag as a strategic tool to your advantage—and not simply because everyone else is?

 

The answer is simple: leverage hashtag analytics. 

It is only by measuring the performance of your hashtags using a hashtag tracking tool, that you can use hashtags to propel your work further. 

Ready to learn how to track and measure hashtag performance? Let’s get started.

But first…

 

What makes hashtags so valuable to writers?

For writers, hashtags can be a powerful tool to increase their reach, learn about their audience, build brand awareness, inform their content strategy, and gain valuable insights about their customers and competitors.

 

1. They increase your reach

Use popular hashtags within your niche and you will have more people seeing your content.

 

2. Learn about your audience

Hashtags allow you to listen to conversations going on online. By listening in on a popular hashtag, you can know what demographics are using it, what are their interests, and the type of content they like.

With this info, you can then easily create audience personas for your writing business.

 

3. Brand awareness

By consistently using a hashtag, people will become more aware of who you are and what you write about.

 

4. Inform your content strategy

By checking out trending hashtags or the hashtags popular within your niche, you can learn what content people want to consume. Knowing this helps you create a targeted content strategy that’s bound to bring you more results. 

 

5. They provide powerful insights

When you measure your hashtags properly, you will be able to learn more about your customers, and competitors. 

 

So many writers know they should use hashtags to increase their reach and sell more, but not enough writers use hashtags as an analytics tool. 

If you’re not tracking hashtags analytics, let’s help you start today.

 

How to Use Hashtag Analytics to Sell More

 

1.  Understand The Hashtag Before You Use It

You do not want to spam your social media accounts with irrelevant hashtags otherwise your content will be filtered as spam.

Use a hashtag monitoring tool of your choice to see if other people are using the hashtag you have chosen and how they are using it. 

You want to be sure that your hashtag is not being used for the wrong reason. Also, it is not something that can be interpreted differently. 

You also want to make sure that another brand is not using your hashtag specifically for their promotion as well.

 

2. Measure Brand Reach & Engagement

One of the biggest benefits of measuring the performance of our hashtags is to know how many eyeballs landed on your content.

Hashtag analytics show how many people saw, liked, shared, or engaged with particular content. 

 

3. Identify Your Audience

You want to know who your ideal customer is and what they want, right? 

You can do this by monitoring the people who interact with your hashtags. Which hashtags do they like most? How are they interacting with the hashtags? What are their demographics? Which countries are they in? And so on. 

With this information, you can build a profile of your audience, and then continue to build content that is suitable to their needs.

 

4. Segment Your Audience

Most writers tend to ignore audience segmentation even though it is an important marketing strategy. 

Use hashtags to find the people in your audience that are most important to your business. 

For instance, you may have two hashtags that you are using for your marketing campaign. If you use hashtag analytics, you can analyze each hashtag to see which one is getting reach with the audience that you are targeting for this particular campaign. 

 

5. Measure the Awareness of a Campaign

Tracking your hashtags will also help give you insights into whether your content promotion campaign is working or not. 

One of the best ways to tell if your campaign was a success or failure is the number of engagements your hashtags get and the amount of traffic they drove back to your website or blog. If you do not have a blog, this is an excellent reason to start a blog today.

If the campaign got few engagements, then you might want to optimize your hashtags and/or content. 

 

6. Content & Competitor Analysis

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle” – Sun Tzu, The Art of War

While you are not necessarily at war with your competitors, you want to beat them. And so, competitive analysis is crucial to success. When it comes to social media, it pays a lot to analyze how your competitors are using hashtags to sell their work.

By analyzing competitor hashtags, you will be able to set reasonable campaign goals. You will also be able to find out which hashtags are performing better than what you have and use them to improve your campaigns. 

You can also start tracking hashtags in your writing niche, and you’ll be able to learn what types of content your target audience engages with most.

 

7. Track The Positive & Negative Mentions

Beyond knowing how many people engaged with your content, you also want to know how they felt about it. 

Your goal is to create content that brings out a positive sentiment around your brand. People who feel good about your brand will want to buy your work. So it is important to measure the sentiment surrounding your hashtags.

 

Top Hashtag Tracking Tools

Now that you know why you must monitor and measure your hashtags, let’s take a look at three of the best hashtag analytics tools available in the market right now.

 

1. Keyhole

Keyhole ranks high because it provides in-depth hashtag analysis in an easy-to-understand manner.

This tool allows you to accurately track your hashtags across multiple social networks, all in a single dashboard.

 

You can also use Keyhole to find trending topics that relate to your work to always stay relevant and ahead of the competition. 

Additionally, you can benchmark your competitors’ hashtag use so that you can outperform them.

 

2. Hashtagify

Hashtagify is one of the most user-friendly hashtag-tracking tools you will find. This tool allows you to find relevant hashtags connected to a particular keyword.

You can then export a mini report with the popularity of each hashtag in your results. 

Login and you will be able to save your searches and go through them later. 

Hashtagify allows you to measure the reach, popularity, and engagement of our hashtags. It also allows you to determine the best time for posting and much more.

 

3. RiteTag

Want to know which hashtags are trending in your niche? Use RiteTag. 

This simple and self-explanatory tool allows you to see which hashtags will make your content more discoverable and give it the widest reach. 

Already got a hashtag in mind? RiteTag will evaluate your hashtags and rate them as great, good, unused, or overuse. 

 

Conclusion

Hashtags are one of the most powerful organic social media strategies that you can use to sell your work.

When you use hashtags in your social media content, you increase your reach and engagement, and consequently the number of paying customers. 

However, to maximize their performance, you MUST track your hashtags. So go on, get started today!