Best Hashtag Research Tools for Small Businesses

Hashtag research tools are a thing. An important thing. As a small business, you need prospective customers to find you, interact with your business, and share your content. Hashtags may seem simple, but getting them right can play a significant role in the effectiveness of your social media marketing campaigns.

To help you, we’re creating an all-in-one resource that gives you everything you need to choose the best hashtags for your small business. With these hashtag research tools, you’ll save money and reach the target audience best suited for your current campaign. Even more importantly, you stop wasting time trying to think up the right hashtags to use.

Before you go, we’ll also provide you with some insider tips about free organic traffic rating. At Hike SEO, we’re here to help businesses – even small businesses – reach their audience in meaningful ways, giving you the resources to compete against huge marketing budgets without spending much at all.

Why Hashtags Matter for Your Small Business Marketing Effort

Hashtags are a component of your marketing strategy. They aren’t just there to make your post stand out. There’s authentic value in using them. Think of them as keywords, a way to categorize the posts you put up online, and a way for people to discover your content that may not have done so before.

When you use hashtags as a component of your marketing, you’ll see several key benefits:

• Reach more people beyond your current followers. People can discover that you are interested in the topics you’re posting about, who didn’t know your company existed.
• Pick up traction on trending topics. Hashtags help you to pull in traffic from topics that everyone seems to be talking about – if it is relevant to your business, that could give your campaign a nice boost.
• Get more interaction with your users and readers. Hashtags allow you to encourage customers and prospective customers to interact with you, including leaving comments and liking your post. They also help you get more shares for your content.
• Tracking campaign reach. You can use hashtags you develop to help you see how far-reaching your campaigns are going (more reach means more leads).
• Establish and build your brand recognition. The properly placed hashtag allows you to establish yourself, monitor your interactions, and even monitor your competitors.

There’s another way to use hashtags as well. That’s to optimize your content on social media. Hashtags help to organize your content, making it possible for people and search engines to connect the pieces to the puzzle to get a more authentic view of your business. They can give your small business an SEO social media boost easily (without any added cost to your campaign).

For all of these reasons, your social media marketing campaign as a small business needs to include hashtags. The problem is that the hashtag needs to be more than just your brand name. It needs to offer some type of link, bond, or connection point with others.

Like keywords, some small business owners trying to tackle their own marketing will use whatever words they think relate to their marketing and customers. However, if you do a bit of research, you’ll be able to use more effective hashtags that actually help extend your reach. The good news is it’s not hard to get started.

What Makes for a Good Hashtag Research Tool?

Before you invest the time in any tool, learn what it can offer to you. You don’t want to download to fill out complicated sign-ups only to find the tool doesn’t offer enough of what you need. The best hashtags are social listening tools, providing you with feedback and making it easy to monitor your market. We encourage you to look for tools that do the following:

• Provide real-time tracking to catch the latest trends as they happen
• Historical data to analyze how well hashtags are working for your engagement goals
• Engagement metrics and analytics that give you helpful insights on competitors
• Notifications for mentions in real time
• Easy to use (you don’t need to invest more time into hashtag research than a few minutes per post)

Some hashtag tools have limits. They may not track enough information. Some have caps on how frequently you can search. If you find a tool you really like, upgrading to a paid subscription could be beneficial. You’re not at that point just yet, though.

The Top Hashtag Research Tools for Small Businesses

Hashtag research tools are very easy to use, and they provide real-time data and insights you can use to influence your decision-making. With the support of these hashtag research tools, you’ll spend less time coming up with tags and more time talking to interested parties.

These are the best hashtag research tools all small business owners should be using. Even better? Some of them are free to use (though upgraded features may be available!)

1. TweetBinder

Use for:

• X (Twitter) analytics

Though TweetBinder has a few limitations on features, it offers what you need to create hashtags that get results. It has a hashtag analytics feature that helps you learn quickly what type of performance you’ll get from using the hashtag. You can analyze 200 tweets from the previous 7 days. It’s a good beginning option for most needs as a small business owner who’s trying to build a presence on X.

It will track metrics for X hashtags as well as keywords and specific accounts. The data is then presented to you in a visual graphic that helps you to see how well any campaign may be running. It has a basic sentiment score tracking tool and an economic value calculation that’s interesting to see in action.

2. Talkwalker

Used for:

• Multimedia hashtag analysis
• Sentiment monitoring

Hootsuite offers Talkwalker, with a free social search feature that gives you access to a hashtag analyzer. It’s worth the extra steps there. What makes this tool beneficial is that it monitors online mentions across most sites, including podcasts, forums, news, and social media, creating more of a holistic look at the content out there.

If your small business has international clients, Talkwalker is even better because it covers 186 languages. It will provide metrics about a variety of factors such as potential reach, general buzz, and sentiment. You can select a trending hashtag and then check out how it is performing across the internet.

3. BrandMentions

Use for:

• Hashtag mentions and monitoring

If you want to track hashtags with your brand name or product names, BrandMentions offers a hashtag tracker that’s easy to use. It provides extensive analytics across all social media platforms and monitors your hashtags over a period of time. It then provides real-time data to help you modify your campaigns or track mentions of your company (good and bad) across platforms.

This tool seeks out all mentions of a specific hashtag across the internet. It then provides you with insights on what is being said. The tool then takes the information and creates a report that outlines how the tag is being used and the impact or reach it has.

4. Canva

Use for:

• Creating Instagram hashtags

Canva’s hashtag generator is the simplest thing to use. If you are creating a social marketing campaign with Instagram, you’ll find that Canva is the most direct solution for creating a hashtag. All you need to do is brainstorm with a few words, and the AI tool will create a hashtag that fits your needs. Type in a prompt into the OpenAI tool, and it will provide you with hashtag ideas without any delay or cost.

You can also create a theme or a specific goal. For example,  you may want a humorous hashtag. You may want something that’s more formal or very serious. There’s no real limit to what you’re after. You just need to drop in a few statements and offer some insight into what you’re talking about, and it pulls easy-to-remember and excellent overall hashtags to use in your Instagram posts.

5. Inflact Hashtag Generator

Use for:

• Hashtag generation

You can use Inflact Hashtag Generator for more than just Instagram, though it was built for that social media platform. It takes only a few minutes to use – provide a keyword or target topic you’re talking about in your post. Then, it will pull together a variety of ideas from which you can choose.

It generates a full list of hashtags that will then be categorized by frequency as well as how hard they are to rank for based on the number of others who are using the same tag. This is important because, as with search engine optimization (SEO), you don't always want to go after the same terms everyone else is using because there's just too much competition to stand out.

6. StarNgage

Use for:

• Influencer hashtag analysis

Another important way to use hashtags is to connect with, engage with, and benefit from influencers. Influencers are those people on social media who have a huge following already, and as such, they can be a source of traffic for your campaign. Learning which influencers are best suited for your small business is critical, but it’s not always easy to find and apply this knowledge. StarNgage can help. And it can help you reach influencer-level marketing success.

It has a free hashtag research and tracking tool that offers analytics to improve your social media influencer campaigns. The tool analyzes hashtags, generates information about how popular they are, and then shows you which accounts are using them. It can also provide you with a list of related hashtags so you can see alternative options. With real-time connectivity, this hashtag research tool is simple enough for anyone to use.

Hashtag Research Tools Support SEO Success

As a small business, hashtags are likely something you’ve guessed at from time to time, but didn’t really know how to use to improve your ranking and reach. Hashtags are one way to drive traffic to your small business website and social media platforms. However, you still need to incorporate SEO.

At Hike, we have created a platform to help you with this process as well. We know that not everyone has the budget a big digital marketing agency demands, but everyone needs to compete against those huge companies and competitors. To help you do just that, we’ve developed Kit, our AI agent that will provide you with SEO automation in a way that saves you time and money while also supporting your organic traffic growth.

Kit is very easy to use, and constantly is learning, searching, and building insights to help improve your website’s organic traffic. As an organic traffic resource, you should be pairing Hike SEO and Kit together to create a website that drives sales once those hashtags get people to your site.

Kit does the SEO work for you while applying real-time data and monitoring for algorithm updates. It empowers you to make SEO effortless and an effective component of your marketing strategy. Learn more about how we can help you by checking out how Kit works or reach out to the team at Hike SEO for immediate guidance.