The #Key to Social Media Metrics

The hashtag is not a new trend on social media anymore. However, if you’re new to the social world hashtags are something to get familiar with. You may think the pound sign (#) is only meant to be used when you check your voicemail, but it actually has a completely different meaning when it comes to social media: meet the hashtag. (MacDonald, 2017)

Hashtags play a crucial role in developing interest in your social media accounts and are used on a number of social media platforms, most commonly, Twitter and Instagram. Including a hashtag with your posts helps to categorize content for your audience. From a user perspective, hashtags allow people to find posts that are relevant to their interests and interact with other social media users who share those interests by joining the conversation about hashtag XY. From a business perspective, it is your chance to be noticed in such conversation and establish your company as a voice for certain topics. Knowing where, why, and how to hashtag can change your social media game and presence tremendously. (MacDonald, 2017) Using a third party platform called Keyhole can do just that.

Keyhole is a social media monitoring and campaign tracking service with a real-time, visual dashboard. It offers monitoring for Twitter, Facebook and Instagram- of hashtags, URLs and keywords. It provides insights such as demographics, location and topic clouds that can be used for identifying influencers. With Keyhole you can also analyse buzz around campaigns in real-time, and finding the most engaging content. (Webtoolswiki, 2017)

Keyhole is a subscription-based tool that allows you to input and measure the traction around various hashtags and a lot more. You can begin by creating a track wherein you insert the keyword, hashtag or URL which needs tracking and select the social network needed or select them all. The data is presented in a single page with a longer scroll. Within the dashboard, several different points of measurement are presented in charts and graphs. (Webtoolswiki, 2017)

You can even save your tracks, for future use! It provides Intel about Influencers related to your industry and newsroom intelligence as well which shows you what sort of content resonates most with your audiences. This tool is a brilliant for measuring your social impressions

Keyhole works exceptionally well especially for live events. You are able to capture the status of your hashtag in real time, and this can help drive your KPI’s. By utilizing the Keyhole platform you are able to determine whether or not you should use more of your advertising dollars towards your campaign to drive more traffic to your website, Facebook or Instagram post.

For a reasonable price compared to other tracking services, you can also identify prospective clients and influencers who are talking about (or looking for) your services, products or organization. (Meyer, 2017)

Keyhole.co goes deeper than standard impressions and reach by giving you more insight into demographics and where your potential customers, clients or members are sharing the conversation. (Meyer, 2017)

Keyhole also allows their customers to see where the conversations are happening, who is having the conversations and what device is allowing them to contribute to the conversation.

Below is an example of the information you can obtain from Keyhole and how it can align to your company’s KPI’s, determining influencers and how your hashtag is a staple to any online campaign.

For a general constant monitoring of keywords and hashtags relevant to your business with great graphs and more details than most other moderately priced services, Keyhole.co is a great option, especially for organizations who want to focus more on conversation and engagement than reach or eyeballs and impressions. As well, Keyhole metrics can be shared with colleagues directly, in case they’re interested in tracking conversations while the live event is happening. Simply sharing the URL and they won’t have to login to see the data updating in real-time. (Meyer, 2017)

The only con to this platform is if you forget to start tracking the hashtag (or turn it back on) you lose data. Only tracks 30 days worth of information. (Meyer, 2017)

Lessons for Others

Even though hashtags are useful and drive engagement to your business social media accounts, hashtags don’t always work on every single social media platform. For example, they are not meant to be used on Facebook or LinkedIn. If you continue to hashtag on LinkedIn and wonder why your hashtags are not clickable, it is because LinkedIn does not support hashtags. This completely negates the purpose and functionality of hashtags. (MacDonald, 2017)

In terms of Facebook, posts without a hashtag perform better than posts that contain a hashtag. Facebook introduced hashtags back in 2013, and since then, research found that including hashtags in your Facebook posts does not pose any substantial benefit. Instead, it actually has a negative effect as it tends to irritate your friends. The fact that hashtags are so unsuccessful on Facebook is partly because Facebook users are not using hashtags when they search. (Seoplus+, 2017)

If hashtags are not something you have included in your social media posts for your personal or business accounts, it is never too late to join the fad. Hashtags are a continuously growing communications tool that can help you grow your social media presence and create more engagement in order to better your business. (Seoplus+, 2017)

If you have concerns as to the accuracy of anything posted on this site, please send your concerns to Peter Carr, Program Director, Social Media for Business Performance.

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